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Comment by api_or_ipa | Hacker News Reader

Why can Firefox build a browser with 16mb and yet every other app on my phone is 80+mb?

Because Firefox Focus isn't itself a browser, but rather a wrapper around Android and iOS's built in browsers. That is why the underlying engine in blink/webkit and not gecko.

I am probably drastically simplifying things but the primary components of the app are just a content blocker and a preferences page.

I would guess that's only true on IOS, because apps are forced to use the operating system's webview?

It's currently also true on Android, because Gecko doesn't yet provide a WebView style embeddable component, so Firefox Focus uses the default Android WebView instead.

There's a bug tracking work to migrate to Gecko though: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/issues/13 (see also the linked https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1322573)

It is also the case on Android. It's nice, because many people will want to install it alongside a full-blown browser. And it makes browser startup quite a bit quicker, making it very much effective at this one-off search use-case.

And it happens to block the vast majority of ads, so Mozilla isn't exactly making friends with webpage owners by supplying this. Had they used Gecko for this, then the percentage of people on Gecko with ads blocked would have risen and that might have resulted in webpage owners spending less time to ensure that their webpage isn't broken on Gecko, therefore effectively dragging down the situation for actual Firefox.

It isn't a priority. Most people are fine with 80mb so it is better to optimize elsewhere.

Considering how may people still have 8GB/16GB phones, I doubt it. On iOS sometimes you have to delete apps, especially ones that build up large caches like Facebook.

wow those people are lucky and high on consumerism, my phone had 2GB.

> wow those people are lucky and high on consumerism, my phone had 2GB.

How? Lollipop, the first Google hit for "Android OS size on phone" (https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/118896/how-much-...), seems to be about 5 GB. (Maybe you don't run Android, or maybe a very old version?)

What usually happens with these phones is they have something like 8GB or even 16GB, but they are poorly paritioned. It could be something like 5-6GB for /system (the OS) and they somehow only leave 2GB for the /data partition.

I've seen a phone like this running Lollipop. The best part is when it decides to auto-update all the built-in (Google) apps, collectively consuming a total of 1-1.5GB of /data, at which point Google Play refuses to let you install any apps because you do not have enough free space available.

> What usually happens with these phones is they have something like 8GB or even 16GB, but they are poorly paritioned. It could be something like 5-6GB for /system (the OS) and they somehow only leave 2GB for the /data partition.

Oh, so you read bigbugbag's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15049992)

> > wow those people are lucky and high on consumerism, my phone had 2GB.

as saying that it's 2 GB after the system installation? That seems to make it a strange response to itg's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15049947)

> > > Considering how may people still have 8GB/16GB phones, I doubt it. On iOS sometimes you have to delete apps, especially ones that build up large caches like Facebook.

which is clearly referring to the pre-OS available space.

Could be a variety of reasons, bad design, cross-platform design, ad-supported and tracking you, siphoning your data, lots of graphical element, etc.

facebook apps are good examples of this.

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