How Much Smaller Could Web Browers Be?

geoff lane asks: "Netscape, Mozilla and IE are all large programs capable of many functions which are mostly unused (Mozilla does attempt to shrink its runtime size by using DLLs.) Lynx, Chimera and a number of other browsers are smaller but with significantly fewer functions. A modern browser needs to support Javascript, Java and SSL. It doesn't need to support News, Gopher, FTP or e-mail - all of which have perfectly good applications available already (though there should be a way for the Web browser to sub-contract work to these applications). On occasion I've wondered if I could build a halfway decent Web browser from a few specialist program components (for the display and parsing of HTML mostly) and wget, tied together with shell script or Perl and using external programs for most of the necessary support functions. How small can a usable Web browser get? (assuming we define usable as meaning capable of displaying a Slashdot page reasonably correctly *grin!*)"

Comments

Opera?

[JediTrainer]

Lose the Java support, and you've got a fantastic browser in Opera in just over a 2MB download, which seems to support just about everything you described. If you want Java, it's closer to 10.

I don't think it could get much smaller, because of the complexities involved in the increasing scope of the HTML standards, JavaScript, CSS and the like, plus the fact that they seem to be writing the code to be reasonably portable.

If you really want to get insane, I'm sure somebody COULD write a browser in hand-coded assembler to be extremely small, but the benefits would be outweighed by the sheer difficulty in maintaining this code and loss in portability.

Want a lightweight Mozilla for Windows? Try Kmeleon. Stripped down, but is fast and small (about 3MB), as well as free, and seems reasonably stable too. I use this and am pleased with it, but I prefer Opera still because it's been in development longer and seems to be more consistent in its rendering capabilities.

Ask QNX

[aidoneus]

If you ever have the chance, take a look at the now famous QNX demo disk (available here). It's a full OS with a fairly capable (graphical) browser that seems to meet your requirements, and the entire thing fits on a 1.44MB floppy. If they can fit all that on a floppy, I'm impressed.

With a little more digging on their site, I found this information page which offers some more details on their browser. it's called Voyager, and it supports frames, JavaScript, and almost all common html tags, and it fits in less than 400k. Even more information on the Voyager browser can be found here.

I hope this is of some help.

-Jason