QtWebEngine Poses Problems For Debian, Distribution Vendors

[Marc Driftmeyer]

I'm looking forward to Debian publishing a full GNOME 3.16.1. I have zero use for KDE outside of K3B and a few apps here and there. I enjoy some of the Qt Apps but I'll dump them all if the Qt/KDE continues to balloon in package numbers and drive space.

I'd rather devote 10GB to Engineering apps and not useless KDE apps

[curaga]

Its funny in comparison to those who bicker about systemd - this is literally a billion times worse, and its a trillion times bigger than systemd ever could be, and is thus all the more unstoppable.

Eh, I was pissed enough that I wrote my own browser, and regularly complain about badly made web pages. Systemd in comparison already had a perfectly working alternative, but it's also pushed in ways that make it a more serious problem than the bloating web.

I can easily switch to another web page if one turns bad, there's 10 alternatives to each. My ties to applications are quite closer, if say GIMP started to require systemd I'd be forced to use an old version; there are no alternatives.

[chrisb]

Netsurf. I'm not aware of it having any particular focus on security, but it is basically what you describe. All its components (HTML engine, CSS parsing, ...) are separate libraries.

I tried Netsurf and some other minimal browsers recently, and none could correctly render the pretty basic web page that I needed it to render. At this stage, I wouldn't recommend them for most users.

Even fat Firefox looks lightweight compared to Chromium.

Debian packages:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 47M Mar 20 04:22 google-chrome-stable_41.0.2272.101-1_amd64.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 30M Apr  1 06:23 iceweasel_31.6.0esr-1_amd64.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 37M Apr  2 08:12 chromium_41.0.2272.118-1_amd64.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 739K Oct 17  2014 netsurf-gtk_3.2+dfsg-2+b1_amd64.deb

Bloated compared to netsurf, but Firefox is only 19% smaller than Chromium here.

[Gusar]

I tried Netsurf and some other minimal browsers recently, and none could correctly render the pretty basic web page that I needed it to render. At this stage, I wouldn't recommend them for most users.

Yeah, that's the problem. There's either the monsters that are Chrome and Firefox, or the lightweights that often can't handle what is today considered a "basic web page". Is it really not possible to have something in between? The only thing I can think of is security maintenance of a really old Firefox, like say 3.6, but no idea how workable that would be.

[curaga]

Yeah, that's the problem. There's either the monsters that are Chrome and Firefox, or the lightweights that often can't handle what is today considered a "basic web page". Is it really not possible to have something in between? The only thing I can think of is security maintenance of a really old Firefox, like say 3.6, but no idea how workable that would be.

Fifth is 7mb compressed (as a normal build, ie dynamic icu etc), yet it supports (almost) every web page that works in webkit. It will likely be even smaller with GCC 5.1's new function merging and LTO improvements. JS can be disabled completely at runtime, not sure if it could be easily removed at compile time.

[GreatEmerald]

Yeah, that's the problem. There's either the monsters that are Chrome and Firefox, or the lightweights that often can't handle what is today considered a "basic web page". Is it really not possible to have something in between? The only thing I can think of is security maintenance of a really old Firefox, like say 3.6, but no idea how workable that would be.

Well, QtWebkit/Webkit-GTK was pretty much the something in-between, though leaning more towards the heavy side.

[caligula]

At least on my box (OpenMandriva Cooker x86_64), QtWebEngine is 68 MB (admittedly quite a bit too large). Firefox is 86 MB.

And your hard drive is 8000 GB? So what? The apps are supposed to use the space we have free. Not using space means it's a broken design, not taking advantage of the hardware.

[caligula]

It is indeed this problem on steroids, and this problem is only going to get worse as long as we allow people to keep over-extending and quite frankly abusing the web. It's important to keep in mind as it stands today Chromium and Firefox both dwarf LibreOffice in size, and are perhaps the largest single project open source code bases out there.

It's not a problem. We have true modularity thanks to object oriented programming.

[JS987]

And your hard drive is 8000 GB? So what? The apps are supposed to use the space we have free. Not using space means it's a broken design, not taking advantage of the hardware.

CPUs with 4 MB total size of cache are common.

[caligula]

CPUs with 4 MB total size of cache are common.

The idea of a cache is not to make the whole program fit in. It should only boost the perfomance of small chunks like cache lines. Besides level 3 caches these days can be larger than Qt/Webkit.