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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[-] Ghoelian@lemmy.dbzer0.com 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.

this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023

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