It’s just that we have to make space for our 5,358 partners and the telemetry data they need.
* legitimate telemetry data
Legitimate interest to train AI
Let me (lemme?) translate this into customer-friendly business language:
Enhanced user experience
Electron everywhere.
And analytics. And offloading as much computation to the client, because servers are expensive and inefficiency is not an issue if your users are the ones paying for it.
I saw an ad request with an inline 1.4 MB game. Like, you could fit Mario in there.
Web “Apps” are also quite bad. Lots of and lots of stuff we’re downloading and it feels clunky.
Sometimes that’s bad coding, poor optimization, third party libraries, or sometimes just including trackers/ads on the page.
I vaguely recall a recent-ish article that an average web page is 30mb. That’s right, thirty megabytes.
It’s amazing how much faster web browsing becomes when I run PiHole and block most of it.
Suddenly the TV is pretty snappy, and all browsers feel so much smoother.
And I’m sitting here uneasy thinking how the hell I’m going to compress my map data any further so that my entire web app is no bigger than 2 mb. 😥
No, you need to go further: https://512kb.club/
That’s straight up not true. It’s not even remotely close to that.
Some devs will include a whole library for one thing instead of trying to learn another way to do that thing.
from * import *A whole library which was meant to to 10 things, but you only use one. And that for x libraries
Nowadays libraries are built with tree-shaking in mind, so when it’s time to deploy the app only the code that’s actually used gets bundled.
Paypal has 500 mb and just shows a number and you can press a button to send a number to their server.
It’s insane
You made me check it, and on my android device it’s 337 (just the app). Jesus Christ.
Mine has 660MB with 7MB user data, 15MB cache.
LMAO, he also made me check it.
347 MB for me, no wonder why I am always struggling with storage for my 128 GB phone (with not expandable storage of course), and I don’t even have that many games, even less ROMs 😅
Check out the apps Hermit and Native Alpha. They make web pages run like an app. I’ve only run into a couple sites where they don’t work right.
Native alpha sounds good since it’s foss and uses vanadium’s webview. Are you still logged in to paypal (any annoying website) a couple of months later. Or does it revoke your rights after a while?
I only use it rarely and I hate providing my info for 5 minutes just to do one transaction.
Has to send a number to Apple’s server too! actually not even sure if that’s client side.
Cheaper & faster development by leveraging large libraries/frameworks, but inability to automatically drop most unused parts of those libraries/frameworks. You could in theory shrink Electron way down by yoinking out tons of browser features you’re not using, but there’s not much incentive to do it and it’d potentially require a lot of engineering work.
Yeah, though the joke is funny, this is the real answer.
Storage is cheap compared to creating custom libraries.
Storage is cheap on a PC, it’s not cheap on mobile where it’s fixed and used as a model differentiator. They overcharge you so much. Oh, and they removed SD card slots from nearly all phones.
Nah it’s fine. Clean up used apps every once in a while. Base phones have more than enough space.
64kb should be enough for anyone
is that the size of doom or something lol
Its a reference to an old he said she said quote attributed to bill gates from the 1990’s
“640K ought to be enough for anyone” — Bill Gate
Yep. Apps are 20x bigger with no new features…that you are using.
Let’s not forget that the graphics for applications has scaled with display resolution, and people generally demand a smooth modern look for their apps.
In the case of normal apps like PayPal graphics shouldn’t be a huge factor since it should be vectorized and there is pretty much no graphics in apps like PayPal.
The issue comes from frameworks.
Ads and trackers
Don’t forget poor optimization
That doesn’t make the software take up more space on a drive. Optimizing is likely to result in a slightly larger install that runs more efficiently.
. . . does. Import whole ass library, use one function, once. Probably one of the easiest to implement yourself. Boom, file grew. Repeat.
Lodash wants to know your location
Tap for spoiler
Get electroned
AHHH, please trigger warning
I’d rather have the Rickroll, please 😐
Fucking Chrome/Electron is why.
I honestly wouldn’t mind that if they could all use the exact same runtime so the apps could be a few MB each, but nooooo.
See: Webview2
Unfortunately, it is extremely painful to work with😔 Enjoy rolling your own script versioning and update systems instead of using squirrel et al
Edit: I think Tauri works by targeting this and webkitgtk via their wrapper library, unfortunately I can’t get my coworkers to write rust
Is there any alternatives to electron ? And why people’s doesn’t move on to alternatives if electron is huge & heavy resources ?
It’s the secret sauce, called unnecessary frameworks and user analytics modules.
With that in mind, I LOVE how lean and fast some FOSS apps/projects are. One of my motivations to go searching for FOSS alternatives is when something seems slow for no reason.
It’s not always the case, but it’s often the case
KDE Plasma has been getting so much more efficient with every release that you can almost recommend it for low-end systems.
I remeber using plasma on a weak 2016 160 usd laptop with no issue in 2018, I can only imagine how much better is now
lol my laptop is from 2011, i run gnome and kde easily. windows usually needs a round of debloating every update to be usable.
User analytics is such an innocent word for spyware.
Bloatware, spyware, scope creep from middle managers feeling uncomfortable letting a dev have a slow day.
The hp printer app says it needs your location to connect to WiFi. It says it needs your location all the time when not using the app, again to connect to WiFi
I think that’s to do with how permissions work.
Having wi-fi access can technically tell the app where you’re located so you need to give it location access
Which is stupid because it then also gets GPS access.
Can confirm.
Now, I just need to know why my calculator needs access to my contacts.
That’s because it gets lonely and needs someone to text.
React
Why? Its libraries are a few kilobytes each.
https://bundlephobia.com/package/react@19.0.0 - 7.3 Kb
https://bundlephobia.com/package/react-dom@19.0.0 - 3.6 Kb
Skill issue
Nailed it. Things have changed to allow cheaper (interpretable in several ways) developers to create “good enough” software as quickly as possible. If that involves inefficient frameworks, technology, and practices that unlock this, then so be it; if the “best” code is the code that makes money, and money is what corporations prioritize above all else, and there is a way to do that quicker and cheaper, the outcome is obvious and now ubiquitous. Furthermore, if nobody at the top cares, why should anyone on the ground care? The problem compounds.
Priorities are fucked.
If it runs “fast enough” on a completely clean system that would cost the average user $1500, then companies assume that that means that it is a good product.
If you want better software, you have to give developers worse hardware to develop on, and more time to develop.
If you want better software, you have to give developers worse hardware to develop on, and more time to develop.
Shhh. There could be application development managers listening… (I’m joking… Mostly.)
deleted by creator
inefficient frameworks
I’d like to object to that. Frameworks are often built by dedicated and paid developers, so they tend to be above average in terms of efficiency. But being frameworks, they have to facilitate lots of use cases, so they also tend to be bigger than what you would write if you had 6 months to roll your own. And 36 more months to kill all the worms that got out of the can, to mangle a proverb.
I wouldn’t say skill issue, more of time issue. You only get a week to implement something. Quicker to use existing libraries than try to optimise yourself.
It’s both, and they are in a sense the same.
Cheaper less skilled or less experienced programmers take longer to get similar results. One week with a a skilled programmer is a lot more value than one week with an unskilled programmer.
Even more if you want to invest some of that experienced programmer time to get the new guy up to speed.
Don’t worry, vibe coding is going to solve everything 😂
I just updated Epic Games Launcher. BEHOLD:
1st update
2nd update
Almost a gigabyte for a mostly blank interface, wtf.
i have a better one, corsair ICUE. 4gb for a fucking png simulator.
God, I hate Corsair. Not only do you need to download their garbage software to fucking turn off the RGB on a headset, you have to have it running or the RGB will turn on again!
OpenRGB was my solution to almost all my RBG woes. It doesn’t work for everything but they have a compatibility page and it’s like 5-10mb.
Thanks for sharing that. My device isn’t listed, but I’d be surprised if Corsair changed how their shit works that much between devices. I’ll give it a try (it supposedly even works on Linux <3)
uh, please do ask, why does opening a fucking glorified text and image processing app require 1 gigabyte of ram.
Who wrote this software? The guy from the bible who was the model for greed and gluttony? Jesus christ.
It’s like Moore’s law. The number of bytes for a basic app doubles every 2.5 years.
When I was young, we’d get a few different games games on a single 1.4 Mb floppy disk. The games were simpler, sure, but exactly the same games now would be far bigger in bytes.
At least games make sense, as the graphics get better. Though in some cases, the compression is also better. Like PS5 games are smaller on average than their PS4 versions, even though they have higher resolution textures in most cases, just because the PS5 has better compression/decompression tech.
Better than that, the lack of reliance on spinning disks means that asset duplication and data read order is less of a requirement to reduce load times. It can still be argued that there’s just too many polygons, since simply scaling things back would be plenty effective in reducing storage usage and load times.
deleted by creator
Compression is mostly done in software.
uh, bad news for you.
All programming is done in software my guy.
Games is the one example that actually makes sense though. The game code size hasn’t really increased tremendously, but the uncompressed assets have only gotten more detailed and more numerous.
