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.

  • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
    101·
    8 months ago

    Browsers are highly complex pieces of software. I had the opportunity to talk about browser engines with a hardware engineer for the chrome browser at GDC a year ago. Browser engines have to have more security than your operating system, while also interpreting DNS calls, rendering html/css, and interpreting JavaScript.

    A basic html renderer would be small, like maybe a couple megabytes. But it would have absolutely no security. On the Internet.

    • fubo@lemmy.world
      401·
      8 months ago

      interpreting JavaScript

      Compiling, these days. The JS runtime is a beast.

          • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
            1·
            8 months ago

            Kinda. The other person was right about JS basically getting compiled. Webassembly is like an intermediary language that executes at a similar speed to flash, because it’s more directly translatable to the runtime. Webassembly isn’t supposed to fill the gaps left by flash, but I think it’s a great option to get similar web apps

    • illectrility@lemmy.worldOP
      86·
      8 months ago

      I am aware of the complexity of a modern browser. Still, 80+ megabytes for a simple browser like Focus seems excessive. Especially when the Bromite-based /e/OS browser can provide more functionality for an eighth of the size

      • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
        22·
        8 months ago

        When it comes to software, complexity usually means one of 2 things: time complexity or space complexity. They have an inverse relationship, so if you want something fast you need more memory, and vice versa. In regards to browsers, that means either waiting forever to execute each op or using large amounts of storage/memory.

        • illectrility@lemmy.worldOP
          3·
          8 months ago

          Yeah, of course a lot is cached and stored in user data but I don’t get why the app itself has to be so big. It’s not significantly faster.

          Edit: Never mind all that, I edited the post, the app size wasn’t correctly shown.

          • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
            12·
            8 months ago

            Caching is separate. Honestly, I don’t know how to explain it to you without giving you a college level explanation of time complexity.

            Think about the most basic way to sort a list of arbitrary size; comparing the first item to the second item, swapping if the second item is smaller, and then repeating until no more swaps occur. This has a time complexity of O(n^2), so on a list of n size, it would be extremely cheap on memory (O(1)) but will take a very long time if n is large.

            There’s another sorting algorithm called quicksort that is much faster (how it works isn’t very important atm), with a time complexity of O(nlog n). This is far faster than the other method of sorting, but it comes at the cost of needing a lot more memory to execute the algorithm, O(log n) of space.

            If you scale this simple process to a multithreaded piece of software executing thousands of algorithms per second, like a browser, the size of n scales to the rest of the app. Browsers are generally written in C++, which requires memory to be preallocated. The size of the app includes this memory requirement, as well as the executable.

            • illectrility@lemmy.worldOP
              4·
              8 months ago

              I understand, my confusion was caused by the misleading app size shown in App Info. It’s actually like 70MB so my question is dumb. I’m sorry for wasting your time

              • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
                7·
                8 months ago

                it’s not dumb, and you didn’t waste my time! I love teaching computer science to people. Honestly, this was kinda fun. I haven’t consciously thought about these concepts in about 6 years, so it was a good refresher for me too lol

  • Hugging Stars@programming.dev
    30·
    8 months ago

    All complete browsers are big. The small ones typically don’t have their own engine built-in.

    iOS browsers all use Safari’s WebKit as their engine, so they’ll probably be smaller than their Android counterparts.

      • jamiehs@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        8 months ago

        No it’s worse than that. All iOS browsers need to use a Safari (WebKit) web view as far as I understand. So any browser on iOS is literally just barebones Safari with a different UI and possibly a different user agent.

        In fact, until recently this was even worse as Safari on iOS enjoyed some accelerations/optimizations that the web views did not get to leverage; so for a while all iOS browsers were not only Safari, but they were slower Safari.

    • illectrility@lemmy.worldOP
      11·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • Knusper@feddit.de
        15·
        8 months ago

        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@lemmy.worldOP
          2·
          8 months ago

          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

          • Knusper@feddit.de
            5·
            8 months 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…

          • Ghoelian@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            4·
            8 months 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.

  • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
    215·
    8 months ago

    Dude, you should see webpages… if it’s built using react a website can easily clock in at half a gig.

    • PM_ME_YOUR_SNDCLOUD@lemmy.world
      11·
      8 months ago

      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.

    • ignism@lemmy.world
      2·
      8 months ago

      I am not sure you know what you are talking about. How is react the factor here of making it 500 MB?

      • jamiehs@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        8 months ago

        People like to hate on React these days… don’t read into it too much. As always, it’s the person wielding the tool, not the tool’s fault.

  • Fleppensteyn@feddit.nl
    15·
    8 months ago

    Browsers will grow with cache and settings etc.

    I’m more curious about mobile apps in general. I had to install Microsoft Authenticator to log in to my work account and it costs 165 MB. It sucks because disk space is so limited

          • Fleppensteyn@feddit.nl
            3·
            8 months ago

            It started nagging I need to switch to Microsoft’s authenticator but it was skippable for a while until it wasn’t 🤷‍♂️. They apparently use their own method that other authenticators can’t imitate.

  • Pantherina@feddit.de
    9·
    8 months ago

    There are many browsers that just use Chromium Webview and add their 2 cents. Some Chromium-based ones dont, like Brave, Cromite, etc, as they mod the webengine themselves.

    Firefox basee Browsers all ship their engine included, as geckoview is not a webview poorly.

    • shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      8 months ago

      Amazing, this looks like it’s a lightweight wrapper around Android System Webview. It reminds me of the abandoned Naked Browser. I’ll try it out.

      Edit: My password manager says no password fields detected. Anyone else got Via working with a password manager?

      • the_lone_wolf@lemmy.ml
        1·
        8 months ago

        Yes and i don’t see any problems in that, it will be more secure bcz system webview automatically gets updated to mitigate vulnerability.

        • sim642@lemm.ee
          1·
          8 months ago

          It’s just an unfair comparison. The Firefox app includes a whole browser engine while this one just uses an engine built into Android itself.