[🚀 Feature]: Disable downloading of 60+MB language crx files

[skyhirider]

Feature and motivation

When initializing Chrome, every instance downloads over 60MB of language files.

This not only wastes bandwidth, but also disk space as if you're quickly starting and closing Chrome sessions these files tend to be left over as they are silently downloaded into your default downloads folder.

https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/u78vd0/chrome_has_constantly_been_downloading_something/

This behavior can be manually disabled via

--disable-features=OptimizationGuideModelDownloading,OptimizationHintsFetching,OptimizationTargetPrediction,OptimizationHints

I would recommend having this on by default for all sessions created.

Resources https://github.com/cypress-io/cypress/issues/22622 https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40220332 chrome://download-internals/

Usage example

I would run the driver as always, but Chrome would not download these files by default.

It would be transparent to the user.

[github-actions[bot]]

@skyhirider, thank you for creating this issue. We will troubleshoot it as soon as we can.

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Thank you!

[diemol]

We should not disable things in Chrome by default, which is why we have the method to add arguments ad hoc.

An option would be to do a small blog post informing users about this. Would you like to contribute to that?

I will close this issue now, but we can continue the conversation.

[skyhirider]

If you tell me where and how to publish I can see if I can create an example that replicates it and write about it.

[diemol]

This is where the blog posts go https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/seleniumhq.github.io/tree/trunk/website_and_docs/content/blog/2024

[skyhirider]

@diemol here is the pull https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/seleniumhq.github.io/pull/1853

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue has been automatically locked since there has not been any recent activity since it was closed. Please open a new issue for related bugs.