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Comment by retrofuturism | Hacker News Reader

Let’s deprecate old technologies that are currently bundled in web browsers instead of adding to them. Browsers need to go on a diet.

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browsers are quite fast nowadays.

they appear to be bloated mainly because of two reasons:

1) companies pulling in all sort of un-optimized content and making requests to a huge amount of external services, effectively slowing down the render of pages

2) a lot of developers developing stuff that should really be native code in html+js+css, which doesn't always perform that well and tends to slow down the whole browser. it really suffices one badly-coded app (not using well asynchronicity and/or wasting memory) to make the whole browser appear slow.

No, the browser itself is bloated.

For instance, the RPM for the Firefox I'm using right now is 100 megabytes, and that's an already compressed format. After installing, just one of the components (libxul.so, which has most of the executable code) is over 110 megabytes.

Each new feature will only increase this size even more.

Usually most of the size is various UI assets, not features.

Here at least, firefox depends on libxml2, which comes from a different package. But, bloated is in the eye of the beholder - there's always Dillo and lynx.

Which break on tons of sites because they simple can't render them and never will. That bloat isn't really bloat because it is necessary to handle what modern users want it to handle. Browsers aren't going to probably ever "diet" again. They'll only remove insecure features.

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