[tristanj]

Both of those apps feel slower, I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Newer versions of iOS use significantly more RAM than older versions. I'd estimate that OS RAM usage increased from ~1GB to ~1.5-2GB. This has minimal effect on newer phones with 12GB of RAM, but on older phones such as the iPhone 11 with 4GB of RAM the performance impact is noticeable. Userspace apps spend more time paging and are slower.

Also, webpages have gotten 2-5x heavier over the past decade. App sizes have increased by a similar multiplier.

[fsflover]

It hasn't happened to Firefox. Sent from desktop Firefox running on my GNU/Linux phone announced in 2017.

[handedness]

Sometimes you endorse Firefox on the Librem 5 as a good experience, sometimes you indicate that due to it being fairly underpowered, JavaScript needs to be disabled on a number of sites in order to have a usable experience.

Setting aside the functional implications of disabling JS, can you help me square the two?

[fsflover]

The browser itself did not become slower. JS-heavy websites did. But a lot of other websites still work fine, including HN. This confirms that there is no need to make newer software slower. It's the bloat that makes software and websites slow, not new features.

[handedness]

They already addressed that:

> ...webpages have gotten 2-5x heavier over the past decade...

I don't think anyone is arguing that modern browsers can't load old web pages quickly. And HN still loads plenty fast on an old iOS device.

One minute it's "they still work fine on older devices", the next minute it's 'I have to disable JS for the modern web to be usable'.

[fsflover]

Apple fans are arguing that simple, local apps require more resources, and it's normal:

> Userspace apps spend more time paging and are slower.

This is right in the current thread.

In reality, both local apps and websites do not have to get heavier in order to provide more features. Apple is effectively slowing down everything (as do typical web developers). And yet KDE, Firefox, HN, Mastodon prove that this is not exactly unavoidable.

[tristanj]

Firefox is a terrible example for you to pick as their app size on iOS ballooned from 35MB in 2015 to 373MB in 2026. That's over a 10x increase in bloat.

The developers of Firefox for iOS made the willful choice to bloat their app, not Apple.

[tristanj]

This discussion is about iOS and your Linux phone is irrelevant to this conversation.

[fsflover]

It is relevant. I gave a counterexample, demonstrating that the software must not become much slower with improvements, unlike what Apple fans want to believe.

[tristanj]

No, you pivoted to talking about your Linux phone, because your claim of "look at Firefox it's not becoming slower" is demonstrably false on iOS. The latest version of Firefox for iOS is pushing 400MB, over a 10x increase from a decade ago. I doubt they added 10x as many features. The developers of Firefox iOS chose to make the app larger and more bloated.

Firefox on iOS today is far more bloated than the version released a decade ago. It has more features, more bloat, and will run slower than the version released years ago. Claiming "It hasn't happened to Firefox" is a lie and that's why you deflected.