Comment by FooBarWidget | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FooBarWidget | Hacker News Reader

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Seriously, does anybody nowadays care about a 100 MB desktop app? I developed my first app in 1997 with Delphi and it was only 200 KB, so from that perspective I always cringe when I see that an app I've developed is multiple MB. But in all seriousness, do users actually care? Every time I download an OS X app, it's at least 50 MB, but I find that even I don't care anymore because downloading 50 MB nowadays only takes 10 seconds, and my machine has more than enough RAM to load all the bundled libraries. We are in an age where people deploy VM images and Docker containers that are many hundred megabytes, and it seems people are happy that way.

The alternative is not making apps self-contained, but instead to make them rely on shared libraries. This is much more efficient, but apart from a few neckbeards who cry "bloat" it seems that most people care more about avoiding dependency hell and ease of use, even if that means large packages due to library duplication.

I can confirm that I don't use Atom because of the overhead of the browser engine. It takes about 30 seconds to launch, and it hangs frequently, which to me is unacceptable for a program that edits plain text files.

30 seconds to launch!? Are you running it on a RaspberryPi or something? On my MBP, it launches about as fast as SublimeText3, 1-2 seconds tops.

Lenovo ThinkPad T440 running Windows 7 (not by choice, standard issue for my work).

I just launched it and timed it at 28 seconds. Then I closed it and launched it again and it took 3 seconds, so I assume there's some sort of caching going on. But basically Atom is too slow and bloated for what I need it for, which is just editing text files, CSV files, XML files etc. Sometimes I really need the multi-line cursors for a CSV though, and I'll use ST2 for that, as it seems a little snappier than Atom, although it also takes a little while to start up.

When I write code, I use Eclipse if it's Java (for work) or emacs for everything else (personal projects). I think I'm just going to install emacs on my work machine and start using it for all my text editing needs though.

I would agree with you if you were talking about 20MB. I think that would be my threshold for not caring about how big an app is, i.e. even if it's something really basic like a countdown timer app I would be OK with it being up to 20MB, because as you say, connections are fast and space is cheap. But 100MB? I don't know.

You could install more than 1000 apps on a moderate SSD at 100MB each. How many apps does the average person have installed?

It's nothing to do with how much space it will take up. The problem is that, as a user, I would be very suspicious of a 100MB countdown timer app. I would think that either it's got some kind of adware in it, or just that it's incompetently designed.

>as a user, I would be very suspicious of a 100MB countdown timer app

You mean as a developer. Your average 'user' does not know or care how big an app 'should' be.

I disagree. App file sizes are displayed in app stores because many users care about them.

A significant number of users would notice an app being dramatically larger than it ought to be. I've seen a lot of reviews like "why the hell this app over 100mb??!!1". There is a huge spectrum of technical competence between "I don't have any sense of what a megabyte is" and "Developer".

My laptop has a 256GB SSD. My media collection is 337GB. So a 100MB app doesn't just need to compete with other 100MB apps, it has to compete with my music, videos, and photos. Is a 100MB app better than my photos reminding me of my time in Sapporo, Japan? That depends on the app, but I'm more inclined to delete a 100MB app to make room for more photos than a 20MB app.

If your media is 337GB then you must already be storing it somewhere other than your 256GB SSD!

Besides, does it matter much if you delete an app when it can be downloaded again in a matter of minutes?

VLC is 106 MB. Do you care? I don't, it plays my videos well.

Our connections and cpus get faster, our memories and hard drives larger, but then we write slower and bigger software to compensate.

It reminds me of Newton's third law: "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."

Of course. The world is bigger than SV :P

http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

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