from Hacker News

How Chrome ate 21GB of storage

by ddcarnage on 9/17/16, 4:24 PM with 76 comments

  • by ameliaquining on 9/17/16, 5:04 PM

    I feel like it's slightly dishonest not to mention that (according to the Chrome devs) this problem is caused by poorly-behaved modifications to the Chrome installer made by third-party redistributors, and not by Chrome itself.

    (Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on Chrome.)

  • by lucb1e on 9/17/16, 5:56 PM

    > I’m happily walking away from this with an extra 21GB in my pocket! And now I ask you: is your Chrome bigger than mine?

    Given I don't have to rely on third party updaters, I doubt it. Let's see...

        $ let size=0; dpkg -L chromium | while read path; do if [ -f "$path" ]; then let size=$size+$(du -sb "$path" | awk '{print $1}'); echo $size bytes, $(($size/1024/1024)) megabytes; fi; done;
    172060669 bytes, 164 megabytes
    $ du -sh .{cache,config}/chromium
    8.4M  .cache/chromium
    25M	  .config/chromium
    So the cache is 8M, config files 25M and program files 164M (listed by dpkg -L, then some command line magic to add up file sizes). A grand total of just under 200MB.

  • by Zekio on 9/17/16, 4:44 PM

    This just seems like something that should've been fixed years ago

  • by rocky1138 on 9/17/16, 4:51 PM

    Does this only occur on Macs?

  • by license2e on 9/17/16, 5:05 PM

    I installed mine through Homebrew (http://brew.sh/) Cask (https://caskroom.github.io/) and it is fine (only last two versions).

  • by AstroJetson on 9/17/16, 4:46 PM

    I'm going to post a theory that with 500Gb drives pretty much the normal size that most people won't notice 2.5% tied up in Chrome installs.

  • by mariusmg on 9/17/16, 5:23 PM

    Both Chrome and Opera pull this shit. It's unbelievable they aren't fixing this.

  • by richard_mcp on 9/17/16, 4:52 PM

    This is embarrassingly bad. I know memory is cheap and mostly plentiful, but to have this as a bug for 5+ years is horrible. It's as though Chrome is going the route of web pages and not paying to the size of itself.