
Browser Bloat (1996) - laktak
http://www.miken.com/winpost/jun96/bbloat.htm
======
wtbob
So, Netscape Atlas was 6 megabytes in June 1996; Firefox for Windows 64-bit is
45.2 megabytes today (I picked the Windows download because it sounds like
this guy was using Windows back then); that means the size has multiplied by
7.5 over the last twenty years, for an annual increase of about 10½%. That's —
not terribly great, actually.

OTOH, according to
[http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm](http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm) disk
prices have been dropping by almost a third every year, with the result that
the cost of a Firefox install in 2016 is less than 1/500th the cost of a
Netscape install in 1996. That's pretty awesome!

~~~
13of40
I would like to think that after 20 years of effort, Netscape actually _does
more than 7.5 times as much stuff_ as it did in 1996. Assuming the original
version even runs anymore, you should fire it up and see how it compares to a
modern web browser.

~~~
jupiter2
> Assuming the original version even runs anymore, you should fire it up and
> see how it compares to a modern web browser.

It doesn't do too well: [http://oldweb.today/](http://oldweb.today/)

~~~
kristianc
Wonderful link - thanks!

Found this alarmingly prescient piece on the BBC site from 2000:

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/874419.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/874419.stm)

'The next generation of mobile phones will make it much easier for the police
to carry out covert surveillance of citizens, say civil liberty campaigners.'

Hmm, I wonder how that will play out...

------
zeta0134
Well, we're definitely at the point where my Web Browser uses more memory than
my Operating System. I'm impressed, a great deal of this talk could be applied
to modern browsers with a surprising degree of accuracy.

I love looking at the feature list and seeing what actually caught on (Audio
Playback) and the laundry list of features that seemed like good ideas at the
time, but had no place in the browser. CoolTalk eventually got implemented as
VOIP, and chat features showed up on websites once JavaScript got good enough
to facilitate it, but nearly everything else has fallen by the wayside.

~~~
skuunk1
Chromebook user here. The Web Browser IS my Operating System. ;)

~~~
theandrewbailey
Isn't Linux under there somewhere?

~~~
zeta0134
Linux is the kernel. The semantics of this can be argued all day, but the
kernel is not the operating system. It is simply the tiny piece of software
that allows processes to run and manages memory and hardware access. The
operating system is the whole collection of software that allows the User to
manage their system. It necessarily includes the kernel, but it is much more
than just that one component.

I don't consider ChromeOS to be a Linux desktop any more than I consider my
Android smartphone to be a Linux desktop, or an iPhone to be a BSD system.
They happen to share a kernel, but that's really where the similarities end as
an end user.

------
rbisewski
Rather fun read, I must say.

It really seems like it makes sense that browsers really "need" the bloat; it
has got to the point where it ends up being the most useful and most used
application on any OS, for a given section of the end-user base, anyway.

At that point can we really call those features bloat? Maybe in 1996 you
didn't need to play videos much, but a web browser without HTML 5 can't do
what the majority would expect. What users expect from the internet has very
much expanded.

I actually was curious about some of the inner workings of this stuff and made
a browser using WebKit once.

[https://gitlab.com/ibiscybernetics/sighte](https://gitlab.com/ibiscybernetics/sighte)

All-in-all one of the more unusual side projects I played with.

~~~
digi_owl
> It really seems like it makes sense that browsers really "need" the bloat;
> it has got to the point where it ends up being the most useful and most used
> application on any OS, for a given section of the end-user base, anyway.

Effectively the browser has in the GUI age become what the terminal emulator
was in the CLI age.

On its own the browser do jack all. But it allows remote resources to present
a local UI.

Thus my lowly desktop PC can become a virtual supercomputer.

------
sonar_un
Oh wow, VRML, I totally forgot about that!

I still remember trying to find all the VRML sites I could find, in all of
it's few polygon glory.

~~~
jandrese
VRML was way ahead of its time. In the bad way, where the technology totally
sucks on the machines of the era and people think it's a joke for years
afterward. I've been wondering how long it takes till someone reinvents it now
that VR goggles are finally starting to become affordable and broadband is
common.

~~~
nnx
It's coming back as WebVR (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebVR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebVR) )

Initiated by the developer who started WebGL.

------
xeniak
This is well juxtaposed with Cast being added natively into Chrome:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12383367](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12383367)

------
kazinator

      <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">
    

Did Microsoft FP 4.0 exist in 1996?

WikiPedia
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage))
says that it was 1.1 in 1996 and 2 in 1997 (also called FrontPage 98).

This might not be an original unmodified-since-1996 page.

Beautiful page though.

~~~
kr7
As it existed in '97:

[https://web.archive.org/web/19970226231531/http://www.miken....](https://web.archive.org/web/19970226231531/http://www.miken.com/winpost/jun96/bbloat.htm)

The GENERATOR tag was added in 2001-2002:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20020624063420/http://miken.com/...](https://web.archive.org/web/20020624063420/http://miken.com/winpost/jun96/bbloat.htm)

------
windlep
> The browser will require more memory than the operating system it runs on.

Done! And of course, many apps routinely now take more memory than the OS.

~~~
nine_k
An ideal OS would not require any RAM and CPU resources, making 100% of them
available to the applications it runs.

~~~
Viper007Bond
On the contrary. Ideally you'd be using 80-90% of your RAM at all times. Ever
notice that the more RAM you have, the more your computer uses? Unused RAM is
wasted RAM. Recent versions of Windows for example cache things into RAM to
speed up the loading of frequently accessed applications. If you run low on
RAM, then it frees up room as needed.

~~~
crymer11
I don't think the parent comment/thread was correctly read. The point is that
an _ideal_ OS would consume no resources leaving them entirely for the
applications to use. The OS caching frequently used applications is different
from the OS itself needing resources.

------
zwetan
and yet 20 years later, the situation is not that better ...

each browser vendors is still fighting the other ones by adding features that
make their browser the platform of choice like chrome API only available for
the chrome app store

let's all kill Flash because plugins are bad, but let's not hesitate to add
our own plugin, oh excuse me the politically correct word is "addon" as a
native extension to cast things around.

when CPU, RAM and bandwidth are no more an issues let's cache aggressively
everything so that bloated browser does not feel so slow anymore.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
Modern browser extensions are written in JavaScript, making them portable,
verifiable, and easily sandboxed - not something you get with an executable
binary blob that until very recently ran in the same permission context as the
local user - which on Win9x through XP meant root.

Handily (and amusingly), Microsoft's Edge extension API is designed to be
compatible with Chrome's - I understand there's a degree of mutual-
intelligibility with Firefix too.

And aggressive caching just makes sense - consider people today with 10+
Chrome Windows open, all with 50+ tabs each - not even 10 years ago IE6 still
ruled supreme - with one document per window. And even then machines had
similar orders-of-magnitude of RAM as they do today - my 2006 rig had 4GB of
RAM (XPx64) my current machine has 4 times that.

~~~
nilved
> Modern browser extensions are written in JavaScript, making them portable,
> verifiable, and easily sandboxed - not something you get with an executable
> binary blob that until very recently ran in the same permission context as
> the local user - which on Win9x through XP meant root.

Do you think this means that browser extensions are secure in the least?

------
encoderer
I love that they shipped _virtual reality markup language_ before CSS.
#priorities

------
gok
Netscape 3.0 was 6MB? So about a cold load of the average news web page in
2016.

~~~
geon
Perhaps says more about the news pages.

HN is like 9 kb.

------
nilved
The Web is bad and getting worst, not better. I still don't understand why
browsers became operating systems.

~~~
api
Browsers became OSes because existing OSes have a poor security model and a
very poor application delivery model. The browser offers an alternative way to
ship an app to a user without having to go through the pain and suffering of
building, testing, and packaging Windows, Linux, Mac, etc. applications for
the end user.

We know because we do the latter and it hurts. Bad. Especially if you are
targeting a wide customer base on multiple platforms. The pain.

Mobile OSes are somewhat better in this regard from a technical point of view,
but in place of awful technology they have substituted the app store
nightmare. I've dealt with both the Apple app store and the IRS, and the
latter has far better customer service. This is partly because vendors wanted
total control over the "next" platform, and partly because iOS and Android did
not actually _solve_ the security aspect of the OS application model. Instead
they punted on the problem by deciding to just gate keep all code and to offer
a reduced functionality profile to apps.

I am not entirely convinced browsers becoming OSes is a bad thing, and I half
suspect that the web is actually an incubator for the next real innovation in
the OS and platform space. The browser is at least _prototyping_ an OS capable
of rapidly loading and executing untrusted code without instantly melting down
or being pwned by the first bit of malicious code that comes by. This is big.
Try executing code this promiscuously with Windows, Linux, or Mac, or jail-
broken Android or iOS for that matter.

~~~
dcwca
I agree with you completely.

The web became an OS because there's a huge demand for cross-platform zero-
install software applications that run in a sandbox without dangerous user
level access to your machine.

~~~
jandrese
And if you do need dangerous user or system level access there is always Flash
and its everpresent zero days.

~~~
zwetan
sure there are no browser exploits at all ...

Top 50 Products By Total Number Of "Distinct" Vulnerabilities
[http://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-products.php](http://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-products.php)

#3 Firefox

#4 Chrome

#7 Internet Explorer

~~~
jcranmer
Given the context of the thread, it's remiss of you not to include some more
context:

#1 OS X

#2 Linux

#5 iPhone OS

#6 Flash

#8 Debian Linux

#9 Windows XP

#10 Windows Server 2008

Which is to say that, except for Flash, all of the top 10 products are
browsers or OSes.

On the other hand, looking at the full list, I'm not so sure I trust the data
curation. The JRE and JDK are each listed twice (because Oracle bought out
Sun), and Internet Explorer and IE are two separate listings.

------
jandrese
I don't remember Cooltalk at all. Did it never make it past the Alpha? Did it
only ship on Windows? The blurb makes it sound fairly interesting. A built-in
IRC client (or maybe ICQ?), VoIP, and a shared whiteboard facility. It really
imagines the browser as part of a bidirectional communication system not just
a viewer for published content.

Knowing the timeframe it probably didn't work through NAT and died as static
IPs for residential customers stopped being a thing. NAT broke a lot of
promising applications back in the day.

~~~
flomo
If Cooltalk is the same thing I'm thinking about, it took about five minutes
to start and absolutely crushed the average PC. Netscape dropped it after a
couple point releases. It was Java-based but might have been Windows-only.

------
dTal
>A few of the real fringe-dwellers even predicted that Java would cause the
end of Microsoft's dominance of the desktop market.

Android apps are written in Java. There's still time...

~~~
zeta0134
I wouldn't consider this the end of Microsoft's dominance in the "desktop"
market. What's actually happening is that the desktop market is shrinking, and
being slowly replaced by smartphones and tablets as the casual computer.

I doubt it's going to go away entirely so long as Microsoft continues to
sponsor schools with Microsoft Office coursework, but I have a hard time
believing that every house is going to continue to need a desktop computer for
much longer. My parents can get almost everything they need done on an iPad,
and are somewhat annoyed when they stumble on the rare site that makes them
walk into the Office and use their computer instead of finishing the task on
the couch.

~~~
paulddraper
It's the personal computing market though. Close enough translation.

~~~
derefr
I'm not so sure. Tablets are personal, certainly, but Microsoft and Sun didn't
care so much about the "truly personal" computing market (the market that in
the 80s/90s would be translated as "game consoles and PDAs.") Instead, they
were after the _workstation_ market: they both wanted to be the platform that
businesses wrote their line-of-business Intranet-facing CRUD apps in. Any PC-
targeted uses for their platforms were just loss-leaders to win mind-share in
the enterprise server+workstation market.

~~~
digi_owl
And that is why Microsoft went all out when Netscape started pushing the
intranet idea, because it targeted the platform that MS had built up after
they blindsided Novell.

------
djsumdog
Oh the nostalgia! The white board! Cool talk! Man I remember all of that
stuff.

