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Why are (mobile) browsers so big? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Why are so many mobile browsers at least 100, if not 200 megabytes in size? Even Firefox Focus which is supposed to be small and, you know, focussed is 85MB big.

The smallest browser I could find was the /e/ Foundation's built-in browser for /e/OS. It's 12MB.

It's kind of between Firefox and Focus in terms of features so why are all other browsers so big? Is there a small version of Firefox for Android?

Edit: I just looked up the /e/ Browser repo on their GitLab and the browser appears to be bigger than the 12MB displayed in App Info. It's about 70MB, so pretty comparable to the other browsers. I was so confused by the size difference but that's cleared up now.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You’re not wrong but it feels disingenuous to say this. The entire repo with all of its dependencies checked out for a large website can easily clock at half a gig but there’s no popular website now that’s asking any users to download half a gig worth of stuff before they can use it.

There ARE websites where, if you keep them open long enough, they’ll constantly pull more and more data (usually for ads) but even that is measured more so in tens of megabytes.

And none of this is to say that websites haven’t gotten too big, just that comparing a downloaded app’s size to the size of a website’s unbuilt unbundled source with all of its dependencies is an unfair comparison.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

I think he was saying half a gig as in people ask you to build them a react site for about half of what you’d earn by bringing them a chipotle burrito as a dasher.