Hacker News Reader

Comment by HendrikHensen | Hacker News Reader

Well, something fishy is going on because there is literally no way that Safari, in its entirety, is 5.1 MB. The numbers for the others app seem similarly off.

It would be really hard to believe that somehow Apple has found some magic formula to make their apps 100x smaller than Google and Microsoft.

Much more likely is that the reporting by the OS is off somehow (probably most of the app functionality is tied up in shared resources counted towards system files, and not counted towards the app's size).

With respect, I would expect more from articles posted on Hacker News. More thorough research, and in fact an answer to the question.

View on HN

Safari probably is that size because WebKit is a system framework, so it’s just the size of the UI code

Safari is just a wrapper around the system webview framework so it does make sense, although it makes the comparison very misleading.

So are the other browsers on iOS.

Not in the EU...

Yes in the EU. Apple made the alternative browser requirements impossible to meet, and somehow got away with it.

Yes also in the EU.

While alternative browsers are legally usable on iOS, nobody has really published one yet.

Maintaining a browser is expensive and with the way Apple implemented their obligations, it's not worth it for existing browser companies to ship their own engines (and have twice or more the maintenance).

It's not just the WebKit bit, basically the entire app implementation is actually shipped as a "Private Framework" which lives outside the .app bundle. e.g. on macOS % otool -L /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Safari.framework/Versions/A/Safari (compatibility version 528.0.0, current version 623.1.14) /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1356.0.0)

There's a bunch of other private frameworks (SafariCore.framework, SafariFoundation.framework, SafariPlatformSupport.framework, SafariShared.framework, SafariSharedUI.framework, SafariSwift.framework) as well. I haven't checked but I assume it's similar on iOS.

Safari is not a WebKit wrapper. Out of the box, WebKit can only display web views inside rectangles, and nothing else. A web browser is a lot more than its rendering engine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com