[ezdiy]

The answer is - it's sorta comparing apples and oranges - libraries, or general C++ inlining cruft can inflate the binary size a lot indeed.

A much fairer comparison is to compare source side by side. Chromium source is about 4x larger than operas, when not counting any 3rd party dependencies.

Or even better, compile times. Chromium build (or firefox) is half a day job on mid-range laptop (especially with 4/8G memory).

Opera builds in about 20 minutes. I was also pleasently surprised the codebase is not particularly bitrotten, and both VS2015 and modern gcc could cope with it.

[gsnedders]

Opera used a relatively small subset of C++ for compatibility with some diabolical compilers for embedded devices, so in a sense it's less surprising that modern compilers had no problem: there's very little complex going on.