On-device models seems like a good approach to this. Especially if it's silly projects they probably don't need the latest and greatest expensive models.
There are artificial limitations to that. For example, stable versions of Firefox for Android won't install extensions from anywhere but Mozilla's infrastructure.
I find that limitation bizarre from an open source browser; it's the sort of behavior I'd expect from Apple.
I get why they do it; for better or worse, the browser is a major way many people interact with email, banking, etc. etc. A malicious extension would be a world of hurt. Some of that is moving to mobile, but with 5 billion people on the internet, Firefox's "low" market share at 4 or 5% is still over 200 million people, so it's still used by dozens or perhaps even hundreds of millions of people for these high-security tasks.
When I did IT support I've seen so many people do completely crazy things. I've seen people with 6 or 7 different browser toolbars and they use none of them. People with 3 different virus scanners they never remember installing, and of course ransomware they never recall installing either. etc. etc.
And honestly, can you really say you'd never click on the wrong "allow this untrusted extension" button when distracted, engaged in something else, tired, or whatnot?
I agree it can be annoying, but it's not impossible to maintain your private (signed) extensions. And for >99% of people, it's probably a sensible thing to do – this includes most tech people because most tech don't have a bunch of private extensions.
For everyone else, you can sign your own private extensions (some effort, but fairly minor) or use the Developer Edition, which allows installing unsigned extensions.
Gah, thank you. The drop down is one of those terrible ones with no scroll bar and only three entries so I have to do the ol 'scroll wheel and hope' to discover more options.
Only on TGZ files, not zip, which maxes out at 4GB. (This is not because of a file size limitation. The only way to get 4GB is through zip64, which has a file size limit measured in exabytes.)
For you and me, not a problem. My wife is a medical professional and would have no clue what to do with a TGZ file.
Also, the fact that they don't mention this difference- the UI is so poorly done that you can only tell that TGZ can go an order of magnitude larger after selecting it in one drop-down and then looking at the other drop down- is a sign of how Google wants to make this as difficult as possible.
https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2025/08/22/no-google-did-...