[imnes]

Serious question - why would Google need to ask user consent to push a new feature / update to Chrome?

There's been a lot of new tech introduced through Chrome and eventually widely adopted and available everywhere. Without requiring user consent.

QUIC + HTTP/3, WebP, Service Workers / PWAs, WASM, WebRTC, View Transitions API

This feels like just another step of "make this new capability widely available so developers can adopt it if they want."

This one seems to be all on-device local capabilities. Not calling additional APIs or sending data off-device.

Is the argument just around "Don't use 4gb of drive space without asking me first"? What other issues does this introduce?

[judge2020]

Main externality is that this will use 4gb and X megabytes/gigabytes of RAM on the billions of devices that use Chrome. If RAM and disk usage needs have gone up linearly in the past decade, this technically causes a momentary immediate jump in those needs, although people still probably would only adjust on their regular upgrade cadence, maybe slightly faster than normal.

*although this 4gb is probably very likely to go up even more, maybe 8, 16gb models - if the disk space is there, and the computer has the power to use bigger models, I don't see why Google wouldn't ship better more capable on-device models when possible (other than profit motive to push more non-local-ai requiring a Google One AI subscription).

*this idea works absent of the recent AI datacenter-based demand for NAND and DRAM. If anything consumers are avoiding buying NAND or DRAM right now due to the prices.