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Why are (mobile) browsers so big? (self.asklemmy)

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

49 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think that /e/ even a "browser", more like "webview viewer"

[–] illectrility 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

~~It does pretty much everything a browser like Firefox, Focus, Mull, etc would do so I think it's fair to call it a browser.~~

~~Also, the Android System WebView package is not installed on /e/OS~~

Edit: Yeah, never mind all that. The browser's size isn't shown correctly and some kind of WebView is installed so it may use that. The repo is about 70MB which makes far more sense.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Also, the Android System WebView package is not installed on /e/OS

It doesn't have to be visible to you. You would have to check with ADB to actually know that it's not installed.
And I don't think Android without WebView is a thing. Many apps depend on it...

[–] illectrility 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It shows up as an installable app. Although, I just checked the repo of the /e/ browser and it is probably bigger than it appears to be in App Info. I'll edit the post rq

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here on LineageOS, WebView only shows up in the app list, if I tell it to "Show System"...

On some Android distributions, there is a user-visible WebView-app, which contains an updater, but I imagine, that's actually a separate package which just updates the system's WebView package.

And I imagine, that updater-app is optional. At the very least, WebView is clearly installed on my OS and my launcher doesn't show a WebView app...

[–] illectrility 3 points 1 year ago

You're absolutely right, I see it now, too. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Fyi the size of the repo doesn't really matter. The source code gets compiled down and optimised to machine readable code, which is usually much smaller. So that 12mb could still be correct, for the compiled app.