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Comment by kitsunesoba | Hacker News Reader

Another thing to consider in regards to Apple allowing third-party web rendering engines on iOS, aside from somebody needing to take responsibility for the litany of vulnerabilities such a thing would introduce is the sheer size of these things. They’re huge. The Mac version of Firefox is 185MB while Chrome is a whopping 250MB.

Apps start getting annoying to download+install at about the 50MB mark… and are people really going to want ~200MB of their device taken up by something as elementary as a web browser? Don’t forget that a large majority of iOS devices in use today are 16GB models.

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> are people really going to want ~200MB of their device taken up by something as elementary as a web browser?

s/elementary/fundamental/?

A browser isn't like most other apps -- it's a window into all the things. And don't the stats say that people spend tons of time in their mobile browsers?

Anyway normally this is the kind of trade-off that people get to weigh for themselves. There's nothing wrong with your deciding that it's not worth the 200mb or whatever, but surely you (and Apple) can't speak for everyone who owns an iOS device.

Chrome for Android is 52MB download.[1]

The on-disk size of version 46.0.2490.76 on my marshmallow device is 66.55MB + 11.44MB of app data.

[1] http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/chrome/chrome-45-0-2...

I can't speak for Chrome, but the Mac version of Firefox is a fat binary: it has both a 32-bit and 64-bit version. The 32-bit one is needed mostly for running some plug-ins that will only run 32-bit. On iOS obviously the whole fat binary thing isn't needed.

Now half of 185MB is still a lot, of course.

This would be an argument if Firefox for Android didn't ship the entire browser stack. IIRC it's about 40 Mb, total.

Firefox for Android, which ships Gecko, is about 35MB.

And that includes something like 50 locales, which is a big chunk of the size (7MB?).

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