No need for a benchmark, wrapped Chromium is not going to beat Chromium. The curious thing is this urge to lie: a focused UI for Chromium is a valid project, why wrap it in deception and dishonesty?
Sure it can. A chromium browser has an arbitrary number of chromium processes (e.g tabs). The root process quickly becomes irrelevant performance wise for average users.
Even if you have the simplest tab unloading strategy (like Tab suspender) built in, you'd beat Chrome. But, unloading tabs isn't a safe thing to do in web-standard browsers but fine in niche consumer ones.
Its not really word-smithing either, in all practical ways that matter to the end user, something like tab suspension makes it a much more efficient browser. Even if the JS/rendering (engine) bits are the same speed.
Although, to be fair, I'm not sure if Min does this, the chromium browser I made does.
Every time I see a new browser with privacy features announced, I get hopeful it’s actually something new.
Until I discover it’s another Chromium fork with a different skin. I really wish Servo hadn’t died. Until then, I’ll stick with FF.
+1 for librewolf, but be sure to augment your security posture with the appropriate countermeasures when using such a unique fingerprint else your 'privacy' is just getting you moved to an even narrower, and more closely regarded list.
It's in a long line of well-known security UX practices-- what better way to teach the user the right choice than by guiding them down all the other paths first?
Here, let me tab-complete my pubkey so we can continue this discussion in private:
One warning that will avoid you some frustration: Librewolf's default settings delete all browsing history when the browser is closed. If you're using it on a private device and want to keep your history, change the setting the first time you run it. It's in the same place as in regular Firefox, nothing special.
Everyone's comparing this to a regular browser. But since it's electron based, I'm just wondering whether this could be a path to creating a really good browser for development. As of now, most of the debugging that's done on browsers are either based on the tools provided by the browser itself, or via extensions and add-ons.
I just hope, this kind of paves the way for developers themselves to add features and capabilities.
Other browsers in this space - Polypane[0], Sizzy[1], Blisk[2]
Like startup time. I looked at a white window for a solid 5 seconds before any UI elements were painted. That's on the latest 16" Apple MacBook Pro.
On the other hand, if you really like this browser, that may not matter. This week, I read about a new version of Firefox. So I closed it, and found out I had my browser running so long that Firefox needed to update twice.
Lynx won't load Google Analytics scripts for sure. On the other hand your user agent string will be pretty much unique on the web. Partly because approximately no one is using Lynx and partly because Lynx leaks the versions of itself and just about every related library on your system in the UA string.
Apologies for nitpicking, but Lynx is not a CLI program. CLI programs are non-interactive, composable via stdio / shell scripting, designed to do their one task and return you to your shell prompt. Lynx is an interactive, terminal-based (character cell grid) program, that takes over your shell session - it has every quality of a GUI program, except it's using a terminal emulator as its toolkit.
But of course - it's still awesome, it's just not CLI.
Often people distinguish between "command-line interfaces" (CLI) and "text user interfaces" (TUI). So "sed" is a CLI program, while vim is a TUI program.
But it's also common to use "CLI" to include "TUI" programs, so I don't think your parent is wrong.
> But it's also common to use "CLI" to include "TUI" programs [...].
It is indeed common, and (IMO) it is harmful, as TUI programs are just GUI programs in disguise. They do have two unique strengths: readily accessible over a serial console or an SSH session; and being the lowest common denominator of GUI programming. But they don't share any of the typical (desirable) qualities of CLI programs; typically, any CLI features (if present at all) are an afterthought.
$ ls | vim
Vim: Warning: Input is not from a terminal
Is a 100% foolproof and very “loud” sign that today is a scatterbrained day and I should write off the idea of being productive. Or I should have another cup of coffee.
Thank you for drawing this distinction. I had not mentally realized the difference before, this makes me interested in trying TUI programs. Will go check lynx out today.
I just use FF and leave the stock OS browser (typically Edge or Safari) "clean", ready for those battery-saving times.
The other day I only had a 20W laptop charger, which I know is only enough to slow down battery discharge with FF; used Edge, and the battery actually charged significantly. Same experiences I had with Safari. I'll keep using Firefox, because it's good for the ecosystem, but when battery is an issue, I switch.
I suspect that for most people, it still has a way to go before it could be considered a daily driver, but the rate of progress is incredible and I’m sure it will get there.
You have to build from source. The repo is here [0]; there is a link to build instructions in the README. It is still experimental, but has an active community working on it.
I love this browser in theory, but these were my problems with it exactly and they all really hurt usability.
Favicons are ultra functional—when I'm looking for a tab most of the time I'm looking for the favicon, not the title. Otherwise, I'm moving my mouse to the rough area it I know that it is and having tabs that fill up as much of the width as possible kills this as I'm opening more and more tabs and they shrink exponentially.
And why no option to show the addressbar? I feel disoriented when I can't glance up and see where I am. The worst part is to see the addressbar, it hides the page, so you can never see the page and the addressbar together in context.
I was really excited about this browser but unfortunately those were all hard show-stoppers.
To say something positive as I focused on negative there, I love the 1password integration. It's by far the least intrusive I've encountered and I really, really want that in another browser (or for min to fix the aforementioned problems, but I feel like they're maybe core to its aesthetic?)
Recently I've been playing with Rose, which is a small GTK+Webkit project that I've found really nice to hack on [1]. Src: <https://github.com/mini-rose/rose>
I hate to be egotistical, I’m sure like many people before me, I had the idea of a reader only browser.
Of course I never came through with the idea because well…look how much unpaid work goes into it.
As others have said, I don’t think Electron is well suited for anything to be resource friendly. I think it’s well suited for apps on machines that can afford to run Electron, not something as general purpose as a browser.
Writing a browser is very hard, but something done in reader mode is clearly more feasible. I wanted to marry FreeText with Gumbo, OpenGL and C++. Maybe even throw in a built in RSS reader that displays the stripped pages. but I have no idea how to get FreeText working with OpenGL.
I think if I could achieve this, I could get something that’s truly lightweight.
And this pretty much sums up why I hate todays internet.
Writing a telnet client was super easy. FTP, a little harder, but doable. Writing an SVG renderer using any canvas like tech (Cairo, canvas, CoreGraphics) is moderate, but again pretty doable. The fact that the w3c has churned out spec after spec that layers more and more complexity on something that was supposed to be a document viewer with links and such that we find ourselves in a position where advancing the state of the art requires a small nations state worth of resources, just to come current, is profoundly depressing.
My biggest concern attempting to scrape out just the text and images. If this browser is anything like Safari Reader mode, it’s gonna fail to read all those modern pages that are entangled in template engine boilerplate snot.
The web is far too bloated, but it’s been consumer centric for a long time, this was only expected. It’s not just an HTTP document viewer, it’s a pop up tabloid viewer…
I liked suckles surf (which at least uses webkit2 rather than being yet another chrome). But in the end, the web is too complicated for simple tools, something like Firefox with extensions and stuff to handle downloaded files is pretty helpful.
It seems quite unfortunate that such large programs are required to handle current web standards. Anything useful could be expressed as text in plain old html, but then, all the bloat needs to be there to pay the bills I guess.
Stay away if you value your security. Nothing personally against Electron but a browser is (or can be) exposed to all kinds of sites which do not have your best interest in mind. You really want always the latest security updates and a browser with a strong security concept (sandbox, encapsulation, taking advantage OS security etc) which is not the aim of Electron afaik.
Yes. As I understand it, you should not render untrusted web content in Electron. They do have a checklist of how to attempt to do so securely but overall it is not designed to make web browsers, it is designed to create applications.
There needs to be a word for these projects that are a UI layer on top of a preexisting browser engine. Calling it a "new browser" is a little confusing.
I tried this out for a little bit. Looks very clean.
I had these issues and suggestions:
- Set min to dark mode, but it made no difference. Restarted to no avail.
- Set all ads to be blocked, still saw a lot of ads on reddit, youtube, others.
- Design wise, I think the app should default to having borders between tabs.
- There should be more white space at the top to drag the window around. The app opened maximized and when I went to drag it on windows I could only click the the URL bar because there is only a little bit of padding inbetween it and the top of the window.
- I have a large monitor and the when you click on the url bar when you have multiple tabs open, it expands to the full window width so the text you were looking at moves all the way to the left, very nitpicky I know, but I think this is not a great design choice and maybe the text should stay where it is when changing sites.
From reading the headline, I was hopeful that this would be one of my most desired apps that doesn't exist yet: a browser that renders pages in Reader Mode, but all the time.
Unfortunately this is just a regular browser with "minimal" only meaning practically no UI.
I am a longtime very “Mac person” and don’t like non-Cocoa / standard Mac UI apps, but I used Min for a long while. I went back to Safari once Cloud Tabs stabilized, but Min is just incredibly lean, fast, and reliable. Big fan — and I may yet go back!
It would be cool if there was a "reference implementation" of the W3C specs on HTML, CSS, JavaScript etc, that was untethered to a particular megacorporation / browser-vendor / ideology / stance on privacy / insert other potentially divisive fracture line here ... and fully open source.
Then folks could "plug them in" as libraries to their app / custom browser, and go to town adding all the custom ad and spyware or privacy and freedum preserving defenses they like.
Surely a committed group of open sourcers on GitHub could achieve this.
Moving the window is harder than it should be, the main tab takes all the width therefore you have to aim on top of it but not to high... Altdrag to the request, but still rather frustrating
One reason why mainstream web browsers are slow and "bulky" and use a lot of RAM is that they use all sorts of different exploit mitigation and hardening techniques.
One can only wonder what these alternatives do when they claim to be minimal and fast and worse, private. Can there really be privacy without security?
Feels very snappy, but for me it's a non-starter: rejects connection to any site with a self-signed certificate, with no apparent means of override.
I get the security stance, but I configure a LOT of networking hardware via WebUI (eg: Palo Alto firewalls - self-signed from the factory) and this makes it next to useless.
> Or search through the full text of every page you've visited, even if you don't remember the title.
Is that a feature of the underlying browser engine or an addon? I've wanted that for years but maybe not enough to fiddle with an entirely new browser app.
I love Lynx, too. I connect my retro computers to the internet through my Mac. Unfortunately, Lynx has bugs that you can't see on modern machines that show up on old, low speed connections.
For example, when connecting to a web site, it displays a whole bunch of connection status information that I just don't care about. Enough that it's intrusive.
Connecting to this web site, it displays ALL of the following:
Getting https://news.ycombinator.com/
Looking up news.ycombinator.com
Making HTTPS connection to news.ycombinator.com
SSL callback:ok, preverify_ok=1, ssl_okay=0
Verified connection to news.ycombinator.com (cert=news.ycombinator.com)
Certificate issued by: /C=US/O=DigiCert Inc/CN=DigiCert TLS RSA SHA256 2020 CA1
Secure 256-bit TLSv1.2 (ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384) HTTP connection
HTTP request.
HTTP request sent; waiting for response.
Read 1.5 KiB of data, 5.3 KiB/sec.
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
On a modern computer, all that flashes by so quickly that you never see it. On a retro computer at 300 baud, it takes FOREVER, and you have to sit through it for EVERY page.
I've tried every Lynx flag and configuration listed, and none of them actually work. I think the notification suppression feature broke, but nobody noticed it because we've grown accustomed to high speed connections.
tried this recently but like most alternative browsers, if it doesnt have support for ublock or dark reader then im usually back to firefox after a day or so.
theres also another extension that i cant think of the name. it adds the url to the title of the window so that keepass/autotype can detect what site it is.
i have a few other extensions but i would be willing to forego them if the browser was that good
On the contrary, it makes a significant difference vs Chromium. Using Electron means having jettisoned a number of security protections that Chromium offers while exposing the system to the attacks those are designed to stop.
In design terms, this is a wonderful, beautiful, laudable project in pursuit of a great purity of vision.
In security terms, this is an exercise in recklessness. It's irresponsible to even suggest that people should try using it.
This seems like a good start to understanding Electron security and why using it to do what the documentation expressly states is unwise might be less than optimal.
Can you give a specific example of what is wrong with Min's security configuration, assuming it is following Electron best practices. Asserting that the security model is bad and linking to Electron's security tutorial is not helpful.
For my own part, I find the introduction that specifically warns that Electron is not a web browser and should not be trusted to handle potentially malicious code from over a network to be clear enough. I understand that this is an opinion that not everyone will share.
For a single specific example, look at the information on permissions and compare to how min handles them. I also see no functionality that attempts to determine if code is malicious or not. Chrome does have measures in it to do this.
That said, I need to be clear. The matter at hand is not a matter of mere configuration and cannot be addressed by better configuration of Electron. Chromium was designed and built to run in a very hostile context. Electron has been built to run in a much more trustworthy context. There is no amount of configuration that will turn the latter into the former because it is not purely a difference of configuration.
Electron's security model is not bad in any absolute sense. It's designed for a particular context and set of scenarios. Dropping it into a very different one with very different needs makes it a poor fit for the job at hand. You may as well descend into a volcano with a home stove potholder.
I hope this has clarified matters. I understand that some people will be very discouraged by the stance I have taken on this. I have no desire to crush their dreams, only to ensure they make good and wise decisions around security.
First and foremost, electron runs on often outdated versions of chromium which are vulnerable to known 0days.
Electron RPC also makes it really easy to get RCE if you don't implement it properly, and most JavaScript developers don't implement it properly. Electron also does not have anywhere near as much security research into it.
I switched to Safari last year. The battery life improvements over Chrome makes it worth. It’s been a solid browser experience and I haven’t gone back to Chrome for anything. I wish I could add Kagi as a default search.
I use kagi and had not even heard that they have their own browser. Why would why use that over one of the "big three" (FF/Chrome/Safari) with serious corporate security teams backing them?
edit: Okay so it's webkit based, mac only, with built-in adblocking, which sounds nice, but honestly the idea that it can easily install extensions from both chrome and firefox sounds like a security nightmare to me.
The fact that the only mention of security in their FAQ is to conflate it with privacy
"Most browsers regularly "phone home" dozens or even hundreds times. Each request poses a security risk"
Telemetry can be a security risk from a standpoint of exposing PII to a hostile actor.
Full text for reference:
"Each request poses a security risk, no matter what information it sends, by potentially exposing your IP address and your browser fingerprint. Telemetry can also inadvertently leak personally identifiable information or corporate intelligence."
Kagi's Orion runs Firefox and Chrome extensions, including on iOS, and of course works with Kagi search, which is enough better that it's worth switching from Google/Bing/DDG.
---
EDIT to add, on iCab, it's been updated as of 2020, which unfortunately finally dropped the legacy Macs, but does support modern filter lists:
iCab 6.0 (September, 28th 2020)
iCab 6.0 is completely rewritten, therefore there’re many new features and existing many old features have changed. The new release uses the newer modern web engine of the macOS which is much faster and smoother than the classic engine that was used by older iCab releases. It also supports more web technologies.
Because the modern web engine had too many limitations under macOS 10.12 and older, the minimum macOS release for the new version of iCab is therefore macOS 10.13. Older macOS releases are no longer supported. This has the advantage that iCab can now rely on many native macOS features which are only available in newer macOS releases.
iCab now uses the native „Tabs“ feature of the macOS, so the tabs in iCab will now behave just as the Tabs in all other Apps using the native Tabs feature (like Safari Mail, the Finder etc). All the capabilities of the macOS to manage tabs are fully available in iCab as well.
iCab is now using the native filter capabilities of the modern web engine of the macOS. Therefore the filter manager is completely new. The new filter manager supports the popular filter lists from AdBlock Plus, Easylist, uBlock and compatible. The filter manager window provides a few links to web sites where you can find these filter lists. using the „Add“ or „Subscribe“ links on these sites can directly import these filter lists, but you can also simply download these lists into a file and then use the „import“ feature of the Filter Manager to import these files.
iCab 6.0 supports syncing of tabs, bookmarks, reading list, filters and search engine via iCloud. The iCloud sync is compatible to iCab Mobile for the iOS platform, so you can now sync all this data between iCab for the Mac and iCab Mobile for the iOS as well.
The new web engine provides more control over audio and video playback. It is possible to immediately stop all audio and video playback with a certain menu command. But it can also make sure that audio and video playback only occurs on the active tab.
Modules of the module manager can be put into the status bar, so these modules are directly accessible very fast and comfortably.
The App supports private tabs which do not save any private data (Cookies, Caches etc). Private tabs are marked with a red border around the address field.
>Kagi search, which is enough better that it's worth switching from Google/Bing/DDG.
But highly unlikely to be better enough to justify paying a subscription for it (for most people, anyway), so it's always going to be confined to a small niche of users.
Here's a Venn diagram of two "worth it" reasons, not mutually exclusive:
I'd argue if you live in first world, earn a living from tech, even if you don't care whether you pay for things vs. be tracked, it's worth the subscription, in the sense of, it's enough better to be worth paying for as a better tool, not just because there's no gaming of the SERPs above the fold. The Lenses are impressive, but it's not just that, the results are what one used to appreciate from web search. After getting used to the quality, the lower quality of Google or the Bing derivatives like DDG will frustrate you.
If you dislike adtech or value privacy, it's worth the subscription, because there are no ads and no tracking. (Also, unlike neeva, to which I also subscribe, it's not an ad-alternative model from former ad-tech people.)
Does everything need to be a billion dollar business?
Globally, I can easily see enough users sign up to sustain the small team. Their blog post [0] mentiones they calculate they need 25,000 subscribers to sustain themselves.
One might argue this should be a fork of Chromium, not Electron. Chromium comes with native tabs and a bunch of other useful parts, without the security issues that Electron exposes.
> One might argue this should be a fork of Chromium, not Electron.
Fair enough point. One reason it's Electron, I assume, is that it's much easier for typical developers to build than forking Chromium. I've been there. I've hacked at building a touchless-controlled browser that uses hand gesture and speech recognition to interact with the web. I can cobble something basic together in Electron, but it's much more intensive to get off the ground forking Chromium (though you're right the native tabs and useful parts would be helpful).
> without the security issues that Electron exposes.
Another reasonable point. For reference, here's an overview of security from Electron itself.[1] Security issues are one reason I haven't pursued the touchless browser more actively. I don't know if it's a dealbreaker, but it's not my area of expertise and I'd need to get seriously up to speed before releasing anything.
From a glance, it does look like Min is trying to follow good security practices, such as having BrowserView webPreferences default to "nodeIntegration: false", "contextIsolation: true", etc.[2] And in the issues the maintainers seem aware of security issues, eg:
> Making internal pages have the same privileges as the browser UI would be nice, although it's kind of difficult to implement. You could add nodeintegration to the webview tag, but I think there's a pretty big risk of accidentaly loading a regular webpage with nodeintegration enabled if we do that, which would be bad.[3]
Ideally there wouldn't be such a large Chromium (and Chromium-based) monopoly on browsers, but overall I'm still glad to see projects like this trying to create different UI options.
This isn't a fork of Electron. It is an Electron-based app, and as such the Electron project maintains the core functionality of the browser and Min just presents a unified interface and feature set.
They didn't say "fork of Electron", rather Electron is essentially "Chromium - browser UI" so they are saying there is a simplification to be made in an app that is "Chromium - browser UI + browser UI"
Flagging that the phrase "this should be a fork of Chromium, not Electron" is ambiguous between "this shouldn't be a fork of Electron" and "this shouldn't be Electron".
The phrasing is ambiguous, I agree. However, as forking Electron to make Min wouldn't make any sense, and the replier knew this, reading it to mean that seems like a mistake to me. The fact is that it can be very difficult to write things that aren't ambiguous at some level (albeit that isn't the case here), so the reader has to make a good-faith effort to understand.
I wouldn't be surprised if you could find a add-on to get close to that. I used one for Firefox in the late 00s that gave a similar minimal effect, just not as extreme.
Today browsers are one of the most important pieces of security software on our machine. They have a huge surface area, act as a sandbox for gobs of untrusted code and many of us conduct our most sensitive work in them (online banking etc). I'd be hesitant to use any browser that doesn't have the team behind it to quickly manage threats and maintain high quality code.
Sadly, modern browsers don't allow add-ons to significantly alter the UI, so you'd never see an extension like this today.
You can do some neat stuff with userchrome in Firefox (not as an add-on) but it'll break after basically every update. There's no infrastructure in place to update the userchrome in sync with the browser, and Mozilla appears to be hostile towards the whole feature.
There are decent reasons for all of this, but it means the only way to experiment is to basically make your own app, as Min did.
Yeah, when I saw that, I decided not to bother even checking it out. Your app has to be really essential if you expect me to used a bloated, glorified web app.
Everyone is complaining it is built in electron, and it is a browser running a browser. Brave is also built on electron and is also a browser running a browser.
I’m as anti-Electron as the next person, but my arguments against it are due to the bloat and disrespectful resource usage of using an entire web browser to show local app UI.
But if what you need is an actual, literal web browser, then I’m not sure I see why this is a bad choice.
As per their own documentation, Electron is not a web browser and should not be treated like one.
I understand that some may experience differences of opinion, but I regard it as sufficient warning when the developers of something warn that it should not be used as a web browser: https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/tutorial/security
People will complain about literally anything without ever comparing the UI, UX, Speed or Resource Usage of the thing rivaling their favorite app. Everybody should get Min, use it enough time, then make educated opinions instead of hating in web technologies just for the memes.
> instead of hating in web technologies just for the memes.
Let’s nip this in the bud. The comment you’re replying to says “Everyone is complaining it is built in electron” but I’ve read every comment in this so far tiny thread and there is literally one comment complaining of it being Electron.
One comment is insufficient to extrapolate to “everyone” or “all of them”. It sows discord and splits people into sides before there’s been any conversation.
It is Blink which drives the monoculture more than Chrome/Chromium since it is there that standards are made or broken (or flouted). What is needed is competition in this space, a new browser 'engine' to compete with Blink (Chrome/Chromium/Brave/Vivaldi/Edge/etc.), Gecko (Firefox/Seamonkey/etc) and Webkit (Safari/Epiphany/anything on iThings).
Maybe Servo can be rescued from oblivion? Get Mozilla to dump their activist-CEO (who is more concerned with her own remuneration and virtue signalling than with the development of their core product), use the funds thus saved to hire back all those developers which were let go under her reign and get Servo back on track. Blink is the one layout engine to rule them all after all...
A browser is not a web app, it doesn't have a strict separation of "frontend" and "backend" in the same sense that a web app would have; the lines are drawn quite differently. The rendering engine is never "just" the rendering engine; you can't abstract or swap it without tremendous effort.
The most sincere answer would be: "A fast and modern browser with privacy at max, light and fast, with with linux/BSD in mind, by some magical entity that somehow gets enough money with donations, where they let me to donate without disclosing my identity but not with crypto because I'm against crypto".
I did. But the Firefox UI is still very Windows-centric, and doesn't feel like a real Mac program at all.
But the big reason I don't use it is that you can't define how to switch from tab to tab.
Every program on my Mac from Safari to Nova to VS Codium to my database manager allows me to switch tabs with the standard macOS Keyboard Shortcuts settings. So I use the same keys to switch tabs in every program on my Mac. Which is part of the whole Mac experience — Things happening the same way between apps.
Even the Finder, and the DuckDuckGo browser allow this.
Not so with Firefox. The simple addition of "Show Next Tab" and "Show Previous Tab" in the drop-down menus would fix this. It's so simple. So elementary. So basic to every other Mac program I use that its absence in Firefox is glaring. I'm not going to rearrange the muscle memory I use all day every day for one program.
That's absolutely baffling, I had no idea. I've been lucky in that my muscle-memory-trained tab switch shortcut is the one that Firefox uses (Cmd+Option+arrows) and I apply that to every other app on Mac.
Tree Style Tabs are nice. I also have it set up so the URL bar doesn't include search -- and the search bar is separate. This makes it easier to get to the right place by starting to type a url in the url bar. I often just type one letter and then press enter, and voila, I'm where I want to be. It "learns" over time what you're typing in.
Also, of course, you should install uBlock Origin.
I tried it on mobile and it's interesting that quite a lot of websites are broken. Many tapping workflows I had in Chrome on Android are fully broken in Firefox. From simple deepl.com to Google products that look like they dropped FF support.
Even Reddit on Firefox PC crashes occasionally (the whole site turns white while browsing). Reddit on FF on Android is barely browsable.
Firefox does seem to be untested for a lot of websites.
You can't do video calls with Teams in firefox for a really clear and obvious example, but I encounter breakages quite often and have to switch back to Chrome.
Safari suffers the same, but I get the impression people are testing safari more than Chrome.. but I hear so many complaints on hackernews about safari, I suspect at some point Chrome penetration will finally dislodge Safari on MacOS... or if MacOS market share goes down: then it's over and we have a total monopoly.
Thanks, interesting, I'll try it out. I know I convinced my wife to switch to Firefox for Android (for uBlock) and she was complaining even more than I about all of her browsing workflows being crippled.
Compared to her I rarely use my phone for browsing, I do not feel as impacted.
Oh yes I forgot TST doesn't have that since I haven't used it in so long. Keeping groups of unloaded tabs might not be healthy for me, enables my tab hoarding habit.
The Arch Linux Firefox package weighs in at 237.8 MB installed.[0] Meanwhile, Chromium is 20% larger at 285.8 MB.[1] Which other browser is significantly smaller than that? I checked a few other ones and they were all within spitting distance of Chromium.
Also, that's not a useful comparison because web browsers are basically operating systems now, with how complex they are. Not to mention that Windows XP was released over two decades ago. So, again, I'm not sure what your point is.
> "Which other browser is significantly smaller than that? I checked a few other ones and they were all within spitting distance of Chromium."
Safari was 40-something MiB installed a few macOS versions ago before parts of it were migrated out of the app to become protected system libraries. The reason the others you checked are of the same size is because they are forks of the same two browsers.
Add.: I just have to disagree with the notion that browsers are "basically" operating systems because of how complex they are. They really are not. Not by a longshot. Neither do they contain the fundamentals of an operating system, nor do they contain the upper reaches of them. We can pretend they are operating system facsimiles by doing a lot of impressive and fun stuff in JavaScript and WASM, but this isn't the same thing. The complexity of an operating system, even a simplified one, is of a completely different sort and depth. This comparison only fits the sarcastic intention people have when making the comparison - we can joke about it, because of how absurdly large and tangled browsers have become.
> The reason the others you checked are of the same size is because they are forks of the same two browsers.
Exactly. What's the alternative? Safari is nice if you're on macOS/iOS but isn't available elsewhere. Every other browser that has any semblance of market share is a fork of Chromium and shares its size. So I'm not sure how Firefox is "overstuffed" but other browsers are not.
> The complexity of an operating system, even a simplified one, is of a completely different sort and depth.
I agree with this, and it's obviously an exaggeration, but I don't think it's an invalid comparison. The API surface area that browsers need to support is enormous, and they have even stricter backwards compatibility guarantees than most modern OSes. Any browser worth using is going to be pretty large simply because they're complex beasts.
How can it be possible for an Electron based browser to be faster / more efficient / battery-friendlier than the other mainstream ones?
Sounds like bullshit. We need to see some benchmarks.