Hacker News Reader

There was no tracking or ad code except error reporting to bugsnag. Most of it was the firebase SDK. Which we did work towards removing, but which was a long term project because:

- Every single database read depended on it

- Many of them were subscriptions rather than simple reads, and so couldn’t be trivially replaced by an API call.

Don’t use firebase guys.

View on HN

You can see the size of each bundle in here: https://firebase.google.com/docs/web/sdk-metrics

That's a lot better than it used to be. IIRC, at the time I was working on the mentioned app the Firestore SDK was 700kb minimum just by itself, and with Auth and Firebase Realtime Database as well I believe we were over a megabyte just for firebase! For comparison, our API abstraction layer for functionality not using Firebase was under a kilobyte.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com