Lazy and Prompt

There’s also the question of what the browser is even for. A browser is a user agent – it’s supposed to act on behalf of the user, not the vendor. Silently downloading 4 GB of AI model to your machine, re-downloading it if you remove it, and then letting any website access it without your permission – that’s Chrome acting as Google’s agent, not yours. And it’s hard not to notice how many Google products stand to benefit from having an LLM pre-installed on every Chrome user’s machine. With opt-out, of course.

Ugh...

What makes this particular instance so frustrating is that the contrast is right there in front of us, in the same set of release notes. There’s lazy loading for audio and video: carefully proposed, properly standardized, welcomed by all implementers. A true gift to the web community. And then, there’s the Prompt API: rammed through despite broad opposition. One feature shows how the standards process can and should work. The other shows what happens when a company with dominant browser market share decides that the process doesn’t apply to them.