Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by faern 997 days ago
The 500 MiB thing is because the frontend is an Electron app. That's sadly how it is with Electron. The UI can of course be re-written into a language/framework that produces way smaller programs, but it's not currently really worth the tradeoff. Most people are not that constrained in disk or internet speeds. https://github.com/mullvad/mullvadvpn-app/issues/1572

The downloads folder access thing is because Apple made it so. If you run an installer from the downloads folder it will need access to the downloads folder. This has nothing to do with Mullvad, but is a permission check macOS puts on all software. The Mullvad VPN app has no code for doing anything in the Downloads folder specifically.
1 comments
sp332 997 days ago
The Windows installer is 1/3 the size of the Mac one. It's just kinda surprising.
link
faern 993 days ago
The macOS installer is a universal installer. Meaning it contains the entire app twice. Once for Intel and one for Apple Silicon. With a macOS installer for only one architecture its size would be cut in half. Windows don't have this problem.
link