Chrome bloat brainstorm
The answer to "why" given in that thread is very interesting:
"Many reasons, but two off the top of my head: 1. We do distribution deals with Chrome, where we bundle Chrome with other products. These get difficult when our binary grows. 2. We see increased download failures / install dropoffs as the binary grows, especially in countries with poor bandwidth like India. India also happens to be a very good market for Chrome (we have good market share there and growing), so that's also very problematic."
This is a beautiful thing in a world of 600mb printer driver install packages.
I wonder if it's possible to have a basic browser that is very small and has most of the functionality with minimum 3rd party libraries like Flash/PDF plugin. Once the browser starts, the full software installation continues, just like Chrome's silent software update. Slowly, the users have the entire browser installed!
I hear there's a team at Adobe that everyone loves to hate that consistently adds features and keeps binary sizes down year after year...
True story.
Netscape 2.02 was 3.13 megs, for comparison.