this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024

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Mildly Infuriating

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A fresh install of Signal takes up 410MB, blowing both Firefox and Chromium out of the water (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

186 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

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[–] [email protected] 213 points 5 months ago (13 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 90 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

Steam is close but actually not electron, they use CEF - Chromium Embedded Framework which is something Electron uses too under the hood (afair)

[–] [email protected] 33 points 5 months ago

Thanks for the correction, appreciate it. Not sure it changes much though.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

Steam used an embedded browser long before it was cool.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 78 points 5 months ago (3 children)

410mb for chat app seems very unoptimized

[–] [email protected] 81 points 5 months ago (1 children)

[–] [email protected] 46 points 5 months ago

Hey now, the three React Native for Windows apps would be very offended if they were stable enough to read text input.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago

It's because it's an electron app. So in addition to the chat app itself, it also includes a full Chromium runtime. Worse still, the Electron architecture doesn't really lend itself towards reusing electron itself; this means you might have several copies of the same version of electron on your machine for various apps.

People complain about the sizes of things like flatpaks and snaps, but tbh the whole architecture of applications is like this these days. Ironically, flatpaks and snaps could help with this because their formats can work decently with filesystem level deduplication.

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (8 children)

The inability to continue chat from phone is a feature.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 5 months ago (20 children)

New messages will show on all your devices, but yes, it is intentional that old messages are not available to new devices.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

This is because they don't retain your (encrypted) messages on their servers right? Is this for storage reasons, or more just security philosophy of not being able to access past chats when you login from elsewhere?

[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This is not entirely correct. Messages are stored on their servers temporarily (last I saw, for up to 30 days), so that even if your device is offline for a while, you still get all your messages.

In theory, you could have messages waiting in your queue for device A, when you add device B, but device B will still not get the messages, even though the encrypted message is still on their servers.

This is because messages are encrypted per device, rather than per user. So if you have a friend who uses a phone and computer, and you also use a phone and computer, the client sending the message encrypts it three times, and sends each encrypted copy to the server. Each client then pulls its copy, and decrypts it. If a device does not exist when the message is encrypted and sent, it is never encrypted for that device, so that new device cannot pull the message down and decrypt it.

For more details: https://signal.org/docs/specifications/sesame/

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (5 children)

Okay, but can't it be an optional feature? I'd like it if a new device could download message history from an old device by having both online at the same time.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 5 months ago (8 children)

Signal's desktop app is as horrendously unusably bad as the project as a whole is good, tbh.

It's no wonder people prefer stuff like Telegram. It has native apps and all. Or can be used in a browser. Meanwhile Signal is only used in a browser, but you have to download it and it fucks up font scaling and it shits the bed on font antialiasing and it can't even get UI design consistent with the OS it's running on and it won't even use the OS emoji font.

Let's not even mention how you still cannot use Signal on a tablet.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Signal’s desktop app is as horrendously unusably bad

I think this is a bit dramatic. I've been using it for years, no problems.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago (9 children)

For the most part, I don't care about App Size. Storage is cheap. What I miss with the Signal Desktop App is the option to save everything in an encrypted container.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 5 months ago (10 children)

That's why I am so happy that I switched to Matrix - selfhosted with Signal and WhatsApp Bridges(amongst others) and now I only need to keep one App on our mobiles, Notebooks,desktop,etc. but I can still communicate with everyone. (we have have a few mixed groups now)

[–] [email protected] 38 points 5 months ago (16 children)

Is Matrix another one of those apps that when you click on a download link it takes you to a page full of tech jargon shit like "nightly signed beta configs here, just unjibble the .trag file and recombobulate with a python scrab to mambo directory: AAATGFHHOLLLM56888NGAAA.tar.gz" ?

Or is it like an app normal people can use?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Of course not,

with the new encapsulator all you need is to reconfigure your turbomutator to allow electrostabilizer executable to directly read instructions from your self-hosted AI model.

Who even uses python to scrab anymore? Install podman dude.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Signal package has Electron (which is built on top of Chromium and NodeJS) + Signal app code and assets. So not surprised that it's bigger than Chromium.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago (10 children)

Like I know native apps are always better, but why doesn't electron ship an installable runtime so we don't have to have a shitload of inert chromium installs on one machine?

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Debian Linux installation ISO is only 336 MB, FFS. And that’s a whole operating system with user land!

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago (2 children)

No, that's a tarball of a kernel, basic command line tools, apt and a network stack that lets you download most of the operating system.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago

Um, no? The 336 megabyte usb installation media contains everything you need to install base Debian. Most people will want a desktop environment and other packages, they can connect to the network to download those additional packages.

Even the how-to says the network is optional.

https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ch02s04.en.html#idm368

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Haha, WeChat is even more outrageous than this. All your forwarded files will be automatically stored again. Your chat records will always be stored on the disk, but WeChat will tell you that the chat records have expired. In addition, it has recently been discovered that every Once you log in to WeChat, your avatar will be saved more than ten times

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (7 children)

You can actually delete the data for good in both the android and windows software through the interface, and it works. But yeah the amount of data is staggering.

I've got a reminder in my calendar to delete the data on the first day of a new quarter, so this here is accumulated since April 1st:

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Given that they have a native, non-Electron iOS version, it’s a shame that they haven’t built a desktop macOS version using mostly the same code. (To make it look like a proper Mac app, they’d need different UI code, though even without that, they could build a version that looks like the iPad version with no changes, and it would look no worse than the Electron web-app UI and run an order of magnitude more efficiently.)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

They don’t even need to built a separate app if they have an iPad app. they just need to not „not allow“ the execution on macOS.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (9 children)

On my phone is only 171mb.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 months ago

And that's also a lot for an app that doesn't have that many binary assets like images or videos. I do wonder what makes up most of these sizes. I see other apps that are arguably more complicated - like AntennaPod - using under 40MB; So I guess it has to do with actual native apps vs cross platform ones.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago

They're talking about the desktop application.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Why would you not be able to continue chat from the phone? I don't all the time.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Unclear if unintented funny typo, or intended funny comment.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (7 children)

ignoring the fact that it's absolutely horrid.

An install of ICUE on windows takes up multiple gigabytes. Why? Uhm, good question.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Sadly, it's the only way I can contact someone to buy a decent quantity of weed in this state. I get less even if I go to a state where it's legal and I pay more.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

even the phone app is larger than telegram and whatsapp

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