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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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[–] huggingstars@programming.dev 32 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So webkit is used as a system library? Not bundled in?

[–] jamiehs@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year 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.