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.
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.
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.
I don’t think that /e/ even a “browser”, more like “webview viewer”
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
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.
Browsers are big. Some just loads webpage and renders with system webview so they don’t bundle their own browser engine
Dude, you should see webpages… if it’s built using react a website can easily clock in at half a gig.
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.
