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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[-] Fleppensteijn@feddit.nl 15 points 1 year 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

[-] illectrility@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

165??? That's insane, you may be better off with KeePassDX. It combines password managing and TOTP

[-] Fleppensteijn@feddit.nl 1 points 1 year ago

Nah, I had my own authenticator (Aegis) until MS decided you can only use theirs

[-] illectrility@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Wait what? They force you to use their authenticator? How, when, what?

[-] Fleppensteijn@feddit.nl 3 points 1 year 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.

this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023

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