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

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by illectrility@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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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[-] Knusper@feddit.de 5 points 1 year ago

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@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

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

this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023

71 points (93.8% liked)

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