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 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!
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.
How much of that is purely graphical and other resources though? Like the hi res image on the opening page, all the icons, translations etc.
I saw someone do a similar analysis recently about how bloated vim had become but it was mostly documentation (plus translations) and stuff like that, not vim itself.
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.
On my p133 with 32MB of RAM (running mandrake linux, Enlighenment DR0.15 CVS built weekly), Mozilla milestones would constantly swap out to disk while running, due to the massive RAM requirements.
My current KDE Plasma 5 system (Calculate Linux) uses about 300MB idle. Firefox (Same gecko core) is using 464MB of RAM right now with 7 tabs open.
I'm currently building servo (with browser.html) for the first time, and I expect similar RAM requirements.
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.
> 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.
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.
What's strange about that? Applications should be using a computer's resources. That's like declaring that employees now get more of a company's payroll than management.
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.
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.
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.
There are clearly a lot of people that share this sentiment, and sometimes I sort of do too. Is there an answer for those who feel this way? A directory of sites that are pure html, no scripting (and maybe no styles)? a next-gen gopher? RSS? the library? Or maybe there isn't an answer?
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] wtbob|9 years ago|reply
OTOH, according to 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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flukus|9 years ago|reply
I saw someone do a similar analysis recently about how bloated vim had become but it was mostly documentation (plus translations) and stuff like that, not vim itself.
[+] [-] sitharus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonbanker|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zeta0134|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anonbanker|9 years ago|reply
On my p133 with 32MB of RAM (running mandrake linux, Enlighenment DR0.15 CVS built weekly), Mozilla milestones would constantly swap out to disk while running, due to the massive RAM requirements.
My current KDE Plasma 5 system (Calculate Linux) uses about 300MB idle. Firefox (Same gecko core) is using 464MB of RAM right now with 7 tabs open.
I'm currently building servo (with browser.html) for the first time, and I expect similar RAM requirements.
[+] [-] digi_owl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skuunk1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbisewski|9 years ago|reply
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
All-in-all one of the more unusual side projects I played with.
[+] [-] digi_owl|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
I still remember trying to find all the VRML sites I could find, in all of it's few polygon glory.
[+] [-] jandrese|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xeniak|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|9 years ago|reply
WikiPedia (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|9 years ago|reply
https://web.archive.org/web/19970226231531/http://www.miken....
The GENERATOR tag was added in 2001-2002:
https://web.archive.org/web/20020624063420/http://miken.com/...
[+] [-] a012|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] windlep|9 years ago|reply
Done! And of course, many apps routinely now take more memory than the OS.
[+] [-] nine_k|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PDoyle|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zwetan|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] newjersey|9 years ago|reply
Google cast is built into chrome https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12383367
[+] [-] encoderer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gok|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geon|9 years ago|reply
HN is like 9 kb.
[+] [-] nilved|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] djsumdog|9 years ago|reply
Think of how many businesses, groups, etc no longer have websites. They might have a meetup page, but they most definitely have a Facebook Page.
If they have a website, it often embeds their Facebook event listing or uses some Wordpress/Drupal plugin to sync it for them.
The Internet is more centralized and less distributed than it was in the 1990s.
[+] [-] nathcd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fleevy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jandrese|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dTal|9 years ago|reply
Android apps are written in Java. There's still time...
[+] [-] zeta0134|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] digi_owl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djsumdog|9 years ago|reply