Mildly Infuriating @lemmy.world alyth @lemmy.world 5 mo. ago

A fresh install of Signal takes up 410MB, blowing both Firefox and Chromium out of the water

... and I can't even continue the chat from my phone.

186

You're viewing a single thread.

186 comments

Such is the state of Electron.
I'm slowly stopping to care about web apps, however the amount of shit Electron causes is through the roof. Discord, Element, Signal, even Steam is full of it, so you just end up having 8 different "programs" running with every single one using at least around 400MB of RAM.
Can't wait to see something using Rust and Tauri. Graphite wink wink
- Steam is close but actually not electron, they use CEF - Chromium Embedded Framework which is something Electron uses too under the hood (afair)
  
  Thanks for the correction, appreciate it. Not sure it changes much though.
  
  Steam used an embedded browser long before it was cool.
  
  Electron doesn’t use CEF, they directly bundle Chromium.
- Permanently Deleted
  
  I use a whole bunch of Linux distros at work (CentOS, alpine, ubuntu, debian, opensuse) and a bunch on my devices at home (mint, fedora, nobara, and manjaro), and so far the only distro I've seen ship decoupled shared electron libs like you described is Manjaro (and presumably Arch).
- I wouldn't mind so much if they all just used the same bundle of stuff, and you could install that once, and then the apps were all like 2MB each.
  
  But no, big fucking bundle of shit, every single time.
  
  Eh, that's not the joy you think it is.
  
  That's how software used to be distributed and that's where the terms DLL / Dependency Hell come from and why programs used to not uninstall cleanly and break other programs, etc.
  
  It's more efficient, but it's also brittler and a lot more complex to manage. Conversely, bundling everything together with all its dependencies is a lot easier to manage, and a lot more robust overall, but comes at the expense of storage capacity and network bandwidth.
  
  Would be kind of cool to allow people to choose an install method. As someone who has experienced low bandwidth in rural homes, it would be nice to avoid the waste at the cost of possibly managing chromium versions myself.
- I really want to see the zygote approach worked out for electron. It's working really well for android but with electron there are just too many different versions used by the different programs for that to make sense.
- Of the apps you mentioned, I can use Discord and Element in my browser. WhatsApp even installs as a PWA. And Steam games can be launched through Lutris afaik?
  
  There is no such option with Signal though.
  
  With Discord in browser, you lose Krisp, RPC ipc socket support (aRPC might work, no clue), and from what I remember screensharing only worked with browser tab capture.
  Element will eat your RAM no matter where it's running. You could add it as a Nextcloud app to triple your RAM usage! Woo
  And you can't run Steam games without the Steam client running. That's how their DRM works. (Unless you use the goldberg steam emulator, which is a whole another thing to talk about)
  
  Using an E2E chat app in your browser necessarily makes the keys and decrypted messages available to your browser. They would have the ability to read messages, impersonate users, alter messages, etc. It would defeat the purpose of a secure messaging platform.
  
  I don't get it. Who is "they"? Why can't you fetch the encrypted message from the server and then decrypt it client side?
  
  "They" is the browser/browser maker. The browser, acting as the client, would have access to the keys and data. The browser maker could do whatever they want with it.
  
  To be clear, I'm not saying they would, only that it defeats the purpose of an E2E chat, where your goal is to minimize/eliminate the possibility of snooping.
  
  You realize that your kernel which loads keys into memory can also access all this right? So can anything which shares memory space on the platform.
  
  The bigger risk is browser exploits, not just who develops it. There's more attack surface and more ways to exfiltrate data
  
  I think the encrypted messages are not saved in the server. You probably have to backup from phone and restore it on pc. "They" is the other programs running on browser
- Can't wait to see something using Rust and Tauri.
  
  What about sciter?

You've viewed 186 comments.