… and I can’t even continue the chat from my phone.
410mb for chat app seems very unoptimized
A fresh install of Signal takes up 410MB, blowing both Firefox and Chromium out of the water
Submitted 5 months ago by alyth@lemmy.world to mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/333247a1-ae8d-4478-87b3-c8611a1bb9c6.png
Comments
devilish666@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Blackmist@feddit.uk 5 months ago
masterspace@lemmy.ca 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.
lengau@midwest.social 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.
udon@lemmy.world 5 months ago
wait till you meet Line 😶
stepan@lemmy.cafe 5 months ago
The unability to continue chat from phone is a feature.
bss03@infosec.pub 5 months ago
New messages will show on all your devices, but yes, it is intentional that old messages are not available to new devices.
scarilog@lemmy.world 5 months ago
This is because they don’t retain your messages on their servers right? Is this for storage reasons, or more just security philosophy of not being able to access ast chats when you login from elsewhere?
Squizzy@lemmy.world 5 months ago
But if I reply on the phone will it populate the desktop chat and vice versa?
NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 5 months ago
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.
randombullet@programming.dev 5 months ago
Optional how so? It’s a rotating key. Unless you have all of those keys to export into your computer, then you’ll be stuck with the current synced key.
Illuminostro@lemmy.world 5 months ago
[deleted]stepan@lemmy.cafe 5 months ago
Thanks
ovalofsand@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Unabilifiedness
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
What does this mean? I use my phone and computer, and they sync up in real-time without any issues.
stepan@lemmy.cafe 5 months ago
It means that if you have chats on one device and install Signal on another one, the chats don’t transfer to it. After you link new device, new chats do sync perfectly fine.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
After they dropped SMS support and called that a feature, now I can’t wait for their hottest new bug!
Carighan@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
PrettyFlyForAFatGuy@feddit.uk 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.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
Yeah, I was going to say that I’ve used Signal on my Linux laptop and it’s janky af
tempest@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Care to elaborate?
I use the app from the AUR and I don’t think I’ve had a single problem in 3 years.
lengau@midwest.social 5 months ago
The best version of the Signal app was back when it was available as an actual web app.
vox@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
telegram has an advantage of not having e2e encryption default which makes stuff like sync much easier as chats are fully stored on the server, encrypted with your user password. and if you enable encryption, chats stop getting synced
amelia@feddit.de 5 months ago
And anytime you clicked on a link or image in the chat, you’ll have to click into the message field again (or press Ctrl+t) to be able to type a reply. I don’t understand how this absolutely infuriating thing hasn’t been fixed in years. Is nobody bothered by this? I want to be able to alt+tab into signal and just start typing ffs.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
it won’t even use the OS emoji font.
im still amused by the fact that discord mobile uses two yes, you read that correctly, TWO emojis sets, it uses one in app, and the selector, and then uses another for the text input line, because.
VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
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.
lemmytellyousomething@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Same. I’ve seen the alternative called dependency hell too often… Yes, you can.share stuff between apps, but then, versioning is a nightmare.
kostas@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Wouldn’t having full disk encryption achieve most of the benefits of that? In case of someone having access to your unlocked machine what is stopping them from launching the app and looking though it?
VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
Yes, full disk encryption helps against intruders with device access, but not against the files being indexed by other application. My phone is encrypted, but I still use a signal client that is encrypted again.
philpo@feddit.de 5 months ago
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)
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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?
Lazycog@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
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.
philpo@feddit.de 5 months ago
I don’t have the time nor the crayons to explain that to you.
TseseJuer@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I think you mean lazy illiterate people. just pay Google/amazon and be done with it
FractalsInfinite@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
It’s website seems to have had a graphic designer look over it. It seems to do the best of both worlds where you can download the default user friendly client or choose to go down the jargon route if you want to.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 5 months ago
It’s not quite that bad but it was trickier than Lemmy.
vox@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
it’s as easy to get into as lemmy/masto/fedi
ealoe@ani.social 5 months ago
I can switch to Matrix and talk to the two other users on this platform! Can’t wait!
philpo@feddit.de 5 months ago
Yeah, 115 Million users atm. And as I said - you can easily bridge it to other services so you only use Matrix but communicate with others.
alyth@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I’ll give you a little anecdote. I joined a casual server on Matrix recently. Two minutes into the conversation, it turns out the person I was talking to is installing some Linux stuff and watching an episode of classic Doctor Who. That’s two of my biggest interests right there that we immediately connected over. If there are only two users on Matrix, they’re the only two I need.
alyth@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Your post encouraged me to self host Matrix ^^ That’ll be a nice project for the next rainy day
Mikina@programming.dev 5 months ago
I self-hosted it few months ago, and it’s actually surprisingly easy! Someone has made an Ansible script for Matrix with Element and some bridges, that (at least a month ago, IaaC tends to be pretty fragile) worked out of the box on a first try. I just set up some config values (mostly about enabling bridges I want) based on their amazing documentation, and then ran it once and everything is working so far. I even updated it several times already, and every time it was smooth, and it was basically just running a single ansible command. Their documentation is pretty well written, and with my basic cloud, IT and Linux knowledge I had no issues with following it. All you need to know is how to set up cloud VM, get a domain and set DNS, and set up SSH keys to access the server.
In total it took me about two hours in total, from when I decided “I’m setting up Matrix tonight” without any prior knowledge, looking up my options and finding the ansible script, setting up cloud and getting Matrix up and running.
I’m renting a VM on Hetzner for like 6$ per month, and it worked without issues so far. I use it for Discord and Messenger, although the Meta bridge does have some problems, for example I didn’t figure out how to message someone with whom I haven’t had a conversation since I set up the bridge, since only then it creates the room for it. But that can be solved by keeping the Messenger app or usign the browser to send a first message, and it immediately shows in your Matrix bridge (and stays there forever).
philpo@feddit.de 5 months ago
Thanks,welcome to the club! It can be a bit “tricky” at times (and I use a container manager,cloudron, meanwhile as I got too deep into the rabbit hole and now host too many things to maintain them myself) but once you get it set up it’s rock solid.
And I am really optimistic for Element X/Matrix 2.0.
It’s a great standard.
asparagapple@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Signal is Electron (Chromium + NodeJS) + Signal app code and assets. So not suprised that it’s bigger than Chromium.
AnomalousBit@programming.dev 5 months ago
Debian Linux installation ISO is only 336 MB, FFS. And that’s a whole operating system with user land!
KISSmyOSFeddit@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
AnomalousBit@programming.dev 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.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 5 months ago
me when i spread misinformation
9point6@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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?
thepreciousboar@lemm.ee 5 months ago
May be, but I don’t think apps use it. Afaik Teams, Discord and such are all epectron apps, yet they have not much in term of dependencies and large install sizes, so they must ship with their own versions.
rdri@lemmy.world 5 months ago
You don’t understand. Thia way if some app crashes it will not cause others to crash too.
This is how google introduced the “multiprocess architecture” of Chrome.
9point6@lemmy.world 5 months ago
You can still have separate processes and everything else with a shared runtime, you just save having all this wasted storage with every application bringing its own bundled runtime.
.net or Java applications work in a similar way, one Java app crashing won’t take out another just because they’re sharing the same runtime
leaveWitX@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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
viking@infosec.pub 5 months ago
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:
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
“android is good” mfers when they have to manually set a calendar task to notify themselves to manually delete the bloated information for an app that they have installed.
no shade to you specifically, but it pisses me off how much android users circle jerk over it being better than IOS, even though it’s like, moderately less annoying.
AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 5 months ago
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.)
B0rax@feddit.de 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.
poissonDistribution@lemmy.world 5 months ago
On my phone is only 171mb.
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 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.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
ignoring the fact that it’s absolutely horrid.
An install of ICUE on windows takes up multiple gigabytes. Why? Uhm, good question.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
Gimpydude@lemmynsfw.com 5 months ago
Why would you not be able to continue chat from the phone? I don’t all the time.
onion@feddit.de 5 months ago
Harddrives start at 16€/TB, so 500MB would be 0.008€. SSD start at 50€/TB, so it would be 0.025€ or two-and-a-half cents
answersplease77@lemmy.world 5 months ago
even the phone app is larger than telegram and whatsapp
lung@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Is it possible to run the android app on Linux somehow? Hmm…
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
This is why I moved to Telegram. Idk if it’s actually native, but often feels much more so, and less phone-centric than Signal which requires weird auth rituals involving the phone.
Vilian@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
the solution could be deduplication, not sure if microsoft store has it, or windows supports it, this help with the size, bot not ram usage
MeanEYE@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Well dooh, you installed Chrome with it. Add to that their application and there you have it.
irotsoma@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Yeah, I’ve been having a lot of issues with Electron which is basically a browser emulator. It has gotten huge, so applications using it have gotten out of control in size. I get that it’s a quick way to build a cross platform application, but there really needs to either be a better way to distribute it that is more modular, or people need to start building on better cross platform front-end systems.
snugglebutt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
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
taaz@biglemmowski.win 5 months ago
Steam is close but not electron, they use CEF - Chromium Embedded Framework which is something Electron actually uses too under the hood (afair)
snugglebutt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
Thanks for the correction, appreciate it. Not sure it changes much though.
eluvatar@programming.dev 5 months ago
Steam used an embedded browser long before it was cool.
AProfessional@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Electron doesn’t use CEF, they directly bundle Chromium.
skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 5 months ago
flubba86@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I use a whole bunch of Linux distros at work (rhel, 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).
Blackmist@feddit.uk 5 months ago
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.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
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 / Decency 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.
Killing_Spark@feddit.de 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.
rdri@lemmy.world 5 months ago
What about sciter?
alyth@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
snugglebutt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
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)
JoeyJoeJoeJr@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
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.