For comparison, pulled up a computer that's running Windows and has Edge installed (which will be indicative of a large part of the population that doesn't care much about the intricacies of their installs):
Edge: almost 500 MB
EdgeCore: almost 400 MB
EdgeUpdate: about 20 MB
In the grand scheme of things, 20 MB is indeed nothing, because many browsers out there (that cannot be uninstalled without crippling the OS in some regards) are already pretty bloated, use bunches of plugins anyways and just generally have untold amounts of cruft in a variety of other software (e.g. just compare MS Office vs LibreOffice and look at how much space professional software like Photoshop or Blender or whatever takes up).
What i'd like:
- to optionally be able to maximize the browser size install to minimize the amount of data that would have to be fetched over the network (e.g. one bundle for Python, one for .NET/Blazor, one for Rust, one for Go etc., based on what you need, maybe just all of them), the same way that plugins work
- to have these bundles support being toggled (or even downloaded, if allowed) on a case by case basis, as they become necessary (e.g. enabled in daily driver device, disabled and not installed in a Firefox/Chrome/... install inside of a Docker container for testing)
- somehow have the industry force everyone to slow down - e.g. you'd have new updates for all of these come out perhaps once a month instead of every other day, as you already do with front end plugins and needless updates of JS bundles
- so, since CDNs were crippled and browser caching is impossible for common resources across different sites, re-introduce that mechanism in some capacity with these bundles that'd be installed locally
- enjoy the ensuing hell that'd be like the Java Applet idea which was brilliant for rich content but had untold flaws in regards to sandboxing and other things (similarly to how Flash was later also killed off, really torn about that one)
So obviously we cannot win and will never have that.
Alternatively:
- build more static sites
- realize that you can't implement everything you need without JS
- reinvent your own minimalist framework/library, badly; though hopefully use something like Svelte or Alpine.js for cases like that
What we'll realistically have instead:
- unique bundles of resources for every site, no caching across sites, no proper ways to utilize CDNs in a cross-domain context due to fears of being spied on
- fast development velocity with lots of updates, continuation of needing to download hundreds of KB or even multiple MB of JS assets to keep browsing the same content in almost the same way
- the problem will only be made worse by developers pursuing larger WASM bundles, like Blazor in .NET, with few advantages for developers but many disadvantages for everyone else
- this problem generally will not be regarded as serious, because most don't care about how much bandwidth they waste, a la Wirth's law
