I'm sort of just playing devil's advocate here though, since Chrome's "bloat" isn't an issue for me _yet_, though I am weary of it becoming the next Firefox (whose snowballing of features led to an amount of bloat which incidentally caused me to start using Chrome in the first place).
One, two, three... sure, you won't notice a new feature here and there. But, hundreds of features later and the app takes just a little longer to startup, a little longer to update, is slightly less stable than it used to be, has a few more attack vectors for malware, etc. It's more-or-less the principal of the matter, using the right tool for the right job and whatnot; when a web browser starts resembling some mismash conglomeration of functionality which just so happens to touch on web browsing, and all you really need and want is web browsing, then yeah, it's bloated.
I define bloat differently. It needs to a) unnecessarily add complexity to the core functions I personally use, and b) degrades performance. wget has tons of features that I've never used, but I don't consider it bloated. To me, hiding it well does in fact make for a bloat-free application.
Agree with your other points.
I do not see any of the additional stuff that the above poster mentioned. I use exactly one feature in chrome other than just it's web browsing at that is sync. Even then, I haven't interacted with sync since the first time I installed Chrome on my computer.
This is strange since many people say Firefox is bloated but im my opinion it looks about identical to how Chrome looks like, so they seem to define bloat in some other way.
What you would consider bload, I'd call clutter. I de-cluttered my Firefox to this way that I only see the tab-bar, a command-bar and the web page.
But as far as "just give me what I want" I continue to think Chrome does it better.
I think the only strong argument on that side is one you don't make: on first run, Chrome stops and asks you to sign in to your Google account. I do that willingly, because I really like bookmark synchronization. But it's definitely not a "minimal browser" thing and if you're not a Google user it's probably pretty annoying.
