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.
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.
So webkit is used as a system library? Not bundled in?
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.
100mb isn’t that big these days, bud.
But it should be.
Better technology and more storage should never excuse a lack of optimization.
I’m not up to speed on the optimization levels of mobile Web browsers, but these days you rarely see properly optimized consumer software. Games and websites tend to be the worst offenders, and many mobile apps appear 10x the size you would expect them to be.
Imagine the utopia we would live in if every website was as beautiful as this https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/
True, but I’d still like to see the explanation for why a mouse driver needs to be 300MB…!
Rgb.
Ah, of course! And it does have extra buttons too. Remarkable they squeezed all that advanced engineering in under half a gigabyte, tbh. I clearly didn’t think it through!
Dude, you should see webpages… if it’s built using react a website can easily clock in at half a gig.
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.
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.
I am not sure you know what you are talking about. How is react the factor here of making it 500 MB?
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.
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
165??? That’s insane, you may be better off with KeePassDX. It combines password managing and TOTP
Nah, I had my own authenticator (Aegis) until MS decided you can only use theirs
Wait what? They force you to use their authenticator? How, when, what?
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.
I don’t think that /e/ even a “browser”, more like “webview viewer”
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
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…
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.
4MB jquarks browser with built-in adblocker
Doesn’t it just rely on the Android built-in WebView?
Yes and i don’t see any problems in that, it will be more secure bcz system webview automatically gets updated to mitigate vulnerability.
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.
Is there a small version of Firefox for Android?
There was Firefox Lite, but it was really Chromium under the hood (using Android’s built-in WebView, to keep that download size small). It was discontinued in 2021.
Try out Via, it weights less than a MB.
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?
Thanks for the tip, I like the UI
Browsers are big. Some just loads webpage and renders with system webview so they don’t bundle their own browser engine
