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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[-] fubo@lemmy.world 40 points 1 year ago

interpreting JavaScript

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

[-] rockSlayer@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

Fair. Webassembly is fast for a reason

[-] intensely_human@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

Because it eliminates unnecessaryspaces?

[-] rockSlayer@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year 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

this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023

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