4 ms·

at the same time, which GUI applications on your computer are only 1.3mb? 1.3mb seems optimised to me at first glance

lpcvoid 5y ago
It's possible to create GUI applications with under 10kb in size, if you link dynamically and use raw win32 api. Pretty sure that my personal wxwidget stuff was way under 100kb too back in the days. Never used GTK directly on linux, but again, 1MB is an indicator that you are either linking statically, or doing something wrong.
chousuke 5y ago
How much signal is there in that 1.3MB though? We don't think about the weight of websites much nowadays because we have insane bandwidth, but how much of that is actual content? The text on one page can't be more than a few kilobytes, and images don't have to be much more data either if they're just thumbnails.
bscphil 5y ago
Many of them, thanks in part to dynamic linking. (I don't think excluding DLLs is too unfair, after all the browser constitutes an enormous Javascript runtime environment.) VLC is one of the more complex programs out there, and yet the VLC binaries and the libvlc libraries they ship with total only 1.295 MiB on my computer. The main application for Scid, a chess database program, is only 1.1 MiB. (The program also comes with a simple test chess engine and some opening books, so the overall package is somewhat larger.) The binary and libraries for hexchat, an IRC application, total 1.22 MiB. The program files for Pinta, an image editing program, come in right at 1.3 MB. The vast majority of programs are under 10 MiB total. Moreover, I've tried to pick relatively full featured desktop apps, and desktop apps as a rule do more than any 1 MB web page. And these applications come in highly compressed archives, which means that their download size is often significantly less. Furthermore, I would argue that web pages are rarely comparable to applications. When you're browsing Reddit, if the home page is 1.3 MiB on mobile, chances are the first individual post you click on is also going to be 1.3 MiB, and the one after that, and so on. You don't get the benefits of Reddit by downloading an "application" one time and getting tiny updates after that. If you're lucky most of the libraries being pulled in will get cached, but frequently it doesn't work out that way. On desktop Reddit, a warm refresh of the site still used more than 2.5 MiB for me, and that's with an ad blocker enabled.

It's possible to create GUI applications with under 10kb in size, if you link dynamically and use raw win32 api. Pretty sure that my personal wxwidget stuff was way under 100kb too back in the days. Never used GTK directly on linux, but again, 1MB is an indicator that you are either linking statically, or doing something wrong.

chousuke 5y ago

How much signal is there in that 1.3MB though? We don't think about the weight of websites much nowadays because we have insane bandwidth, but how much of that is actual content? The text on one page can't be more than a few kilobytes, and images don't have to be much more data either if they're just thumbnails.

bscphil 5y ago

Many of them, thanks in part to dynamic linking. (I don't think excluding DLLs is too unfair, after all the browser constitutes an enormous Javascript runtime environment.) VLC is one of the more complex programs out there, and yet the VLC binaries and the libvlc libraries they ship with total only 1.295 MiB on my computer. The main application for Scid, a chess database program, is only 1.1 MiB. (The program also comes with a simple test chess engine and some opening books, so the overall package is somewhat larger.) The binary and libraries for hexchat, an IRC application, total 1.22 MiB. The program files for Pinta, an image editing program, come in right at 1.3 MB. The vast majority of programs are under 10 MiB total. Moreover, I've tried to pick relatively full featured desktop apps, and desktop apps as a rule do more than any 1 MB web page. And these applications come in highly compressed archives, which means that their download size is often significantly less. Furthermore, I would argue that web pages are rarely comparable to applications. When you're browsing Reddit, if the home page is 1.3 MiB on mobile, chances are the first individual post you click on is also going to be 1.3 MiB, and the one after that, and so on. You don't get the benefits of Reddit by downloading an "application" one time and getting tiny updates after that. If you're lucky most of the libraries being pulled in will get cached, but frequently it doesn't work out that way. On desktop Reddit, a warm refresh of the site still used more than 2.5 MiB for me, and that's with an ad blocker enabled.