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Comment by trevor-e | Hacker News Reader

It's a bit mind-blowing to me how big browser apps have become the last few years. Firefox 80 takes up 210.8MB and Chrome _689.8MB_ on my MacBook.

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For some reason, Chrome keeps the previous version around after you update it, so you always have two different versions installed (which doubles the space used). If you go to contents/frameworks/Google Chrome Framework.framework/Versions, you can delete the older one and it will work fine, but the space will still get used up again the next time Chrome updates.

Back in the late 90s-early 2000s, Microsoft baked Internet Explorer into the Windows shell. It was badically powering the desktop. Ypu could even set ypur desktop background to an HTML page on Windows at one time. But basically, the browser has been given an enormous amount of responsibility that has not changed much since those experiments. We now have things like Chromebooks that are little more than an OS with just a browser attached.

> We now have things like Chromebooks that are little more than an OS with just a browser attached.

Which makes sense because a browser is basically a set of abstractions over some normal OS functions that blends remote and local actions (even if only a subset of them).

Java wanted to be a universal VM, but browsers actually achieved this through HTML and JavaScript. They're going even farther with WASM.

If by "even farther" you mean "circling back around" to being Java.

> Java wanted to be a universal VM, but browsers actually achieved this through HTML and JavaScript.

Java succeeded, you know. Still happily powers embedded systems, servers, and desktop applications. Still runs the same binaries on NT/Darwin/Linux/Haiku/whatever. Don't dismiss it just because it's not the latest hotness.

I'm not dismissing it... but it's being eaten. The Web is the ultimate platform. Every goal Java and the JVM had (that they didn't mostly drop, like native bytecode CPUs) has either been achieved, surpassed, or quickly will be by browsers, Javascript and WASM.

The only holdouts I see are stuff where Java is part of the standard (e.g. SIM cards using Java Card standard) or embedded systems where they use Java of some sort where it doesn't make sense to use the enormous browser runtimes (although I have to imagine that's a less popular option than C, but I'm not super informed on the embedded market).

I mean, I'm not particularly a fan of where this is heading (it feels like we're heading for the second coming of Java applets/flash and all those associated problem), but it seems pretty obvious, to me at least.

Weird, "Google Chrome.app" is 459.7 MB on my Late 2016 MacBook. I wonder why yours is larger? (By exactly 50%, no less?)

But when you consider the fact that browsers these days are essentially operating systems in their own right, complete with a suite of bundled application functionality (e.g. WebRTC, WebGL, SVG, etc.)... it seems pretty reasonable.

The Google Chrome app on a Mac can also still have previous versions inside it.

Right-click on it and go to Show Package Contents. Then navigate to Contents > Frameworks > Google Chrome Framework.framework > Versions

You'll also see a symbolic link to 'Current'. Right-click > Get Info. on that to see which folder to 'not' delete.

Ah ha, yes the math works out.

I've got 2 versions (230.1 MB and 228.7 MB). The commenter I was responding to therefore must have 3. So the "real" size is ~230 MB, which does seem pretty reasonable, and totally in line with Firefox as well.

(For comparison, Calibre is 207 MB, Gimp is 224 MB, and Kindle is 210 MB, while Word is a whopping 2.11 GB, and Photoshop is a similarly gigantic 2.45 GB.)

Ha, yes you are exactly right, had three in there.

I've been trying a browser called NetSurf lately - it's just 16MB on Windows.

Obviously it can't do everything Firefox & Chrome can - it doesn't even support CSS gradients, and has the worst font antialiasing I've seen in a while - but it's fast and lightweight. Apparently the minimum requirements are a 30Mhz processor and 16 Megabytes of RAM - it was originally designed for PDAs and set-top boxes.

https://www.netsurf-browser.org/

Its lack of modern JavaScript support also makes it good at getting around news website paywalls, if you're so inclined.

You! You're the guy with JavaScript disabled that I have to account for!

Bwahaha! Sorry to complicate your work life :)

Say, while I have your attention, have you considered mirroring your site on Gopher? These text-mode Gopher browsers are superfast, with none of those "PNGs" and "JPGs" that slow everything down. 2020 should be the year of Port 70 on the Desktop.

(Just kidding... mostly. I may have opened a Gopher account at SDF.org during my quarantine....)

Are they getting bigger with respect to average system hard drive size? If anything, I suspect they are getting smaller.

They are among the most complex apps that average users have on their computers.

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