Ask HN: Approximately what percent smaller would a non-JS/WASM web browser be?

The question is in regarding the lines of code / binary size, of the output subset web browser.

Essentially it comes down to just a modern HTML + CSS standards rendering engine.

3 comments

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My wild guess would be 20% smaller. Css, layout, rendering, images, video, audio, etc still huge.

It might become significantly smaller if some network and IO features which are not accessible w/o JS will go away reducing the browser to pdf reader with forms and GET requests.

asadotzler 2y ago ↗

SpiderMonkey in Gecko is probably about 3.5 million lines of code. Gecko, the web engine that SpiderMonkey is a part of is about 12 million lines I think, and the front end for Firefox brings the total near 20 million lines. This is all dated info from when I last looked maybe a decade ago but I think it's directionally correct and roughly similar to Chrome.

So, one might save about 35% or so of the browser's code by stripping out JS and any other bits that are there exclusively for JS in the DOM and elsewhere.