alt Hacker News> That is a far cry from 4 GiB
Equating a 4GB file installed without explicit consent to the installation of a language dictionary is comical. That's like saying an unwanted political mailer left in your mailbox is the equivalent of a pallette of hammers left in your driveway.
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Honestly this is 2026. Chrome on my phone is nearly 2gb. Google on my phone is 1gb. 4gb storage isn't outrageous, Windows barely runs on anything below 128gb storage. Right now my phone has 445gb unused memory and usage isn't likely to go up much. My PlayStation eats 500gb for breakfast. Heck I use a 2011 Thinkpad for casual use and it should still be fine with it.
This is also GOOGLE chrome, it serves their ends, in the past that was to render internet unimpeded (they saw a need then), needs change. I'd rather models serve most requests locally anyway, so long as it's not destroying my battery life.
Remember the whole chrome-RAM-gate saga? This shouldn't be shocking to anyone. PC's shipping 8gb ram, Google removing ad blocker extensions, these should be the real rally points.
Except this mythical pallet of hammers takes up 0.1% of my hard drive instead of 0.0001%. And it isn't blocking me from moving my car. And...
yea your analogy doesn't even remotely make sense
It sounds like you have a specific number of GB in mind that an app can take up, below which it's totally their business, and above which they need to plead their case, disclose the purpose, and allow me to choose.
What's that number? How did you arrive at it and why?
My Chrome binaries are about 700MB on Mac and 500MB on Windows. Is this below or your line, or are they actually in trouble as soon as they're extracted?
My point is just that it seems there may be an arbitrary limit here that may not be the same for everyone (and 90% of users are nontechnical and thus couldn't give an answer whether 4GB is "worth it" for whatever the features are). Rather than add another whole ecosystem of "Cancel or Allow?" dialogs I'd rather operating systems did a better job of letting users put piggish applications on a strict space budget. Most of the apps on my phone are storing half a gig of "stuff" (called "Documents & Data" but not itemized, and even apps that have none of my 'data' such as browsers), which I can't force them to dump even in an extreme emergency. I can only delete the whole app.
I'm talking about Apple platforms as examples because I use those a lot and with their epic stinginess of SSD, anyone who doesn't pay $400 more than the base model will exhaust their storage within hours to months.