[justinclift]

> users don't expect binaries to be small

That seems to only be a "modern times" thing.

Prior to that, minimising the size of shipped programs (binaries, images, doc files, etc) has been important part of release management.

[Vaguely2178]

Binaries were definitely leaner in the past, but there's always been that dichotomy between downloading software and running it.

In the browser, users expect software to be available instantly, and that constrains how you build webapps. Users will tolerate the google maps app taking a few minutes to download, but they won't accept the google maps webapp taking several minutes to load in a browser.