For reference, vscode ships as 13.3MB of uncompressed JS. (Not including builtin extensions, but that wouldn't add much)

Stealing data about the users as accurately as possible requires more code than one would think.

>Stealing data about the users

its not stealing when the users agreed to it

Using a website does not imply informed consent.

No, but signing up for an account and agreeing to the Terms of Service does. The not-logged-into homepage is 1.3mb. Still not tiny, but definitely not the same as the web app.

No it doesn’t. Informed consent is not the same as shoving a ToS/EULA in front of someone who may not have the legal or technological education to understand it or its consequences.

From the Wikipedia definition[1] of informed consent (in medicine):

> An informed consent can be said to have been given based upon a clear appreciation and understanding of the facts, implications, and consequences of an action. Adequate informed consent is rooted in respecting a person's dignity. To give informed consent, the individual concerned must have adequate reasoning faculties and be in possession of all relevant facts.

What tech companies do is obtain the minimum legally required consent - and sometimes not even that. This may be legal, but it’s far from ethical.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informed_consent

Fortunately, Facebooks ToS[0] is not full of legalese or jargon, and I'm sure anybody with enough technological education to sign up for Facebook can understand it too.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/terms.php

Quick read of it and it is obvious that document likely cost millions for Facebook to produce and with the aid of countless hours of legal professionals who in sum likely have 1000s of years of legal experience.

Claiming the average person is able to understand scope of that document— and the likely 1000s of internal documents related to it, and the 100s of thousand pages of related legal code and case law is a stretch.

Document also does not disclose Facebook is subject to secret court orders, gag orders, etc.

— and that doesn’t even begin to cover the knowledge required to understand the related technology and the impact it might have on the users.

Huh. Sex offenders aren’t allowed to use FB.

That's pretty much size of a mobile app. But the thing with web apps is that they are downloaded every time and hence the outcry.

They aren't though. You have a cache.

Facebook release multiple times a day (or they did), so the browser cache is irreLevant.

As mentioned in the blogpost, they use code splitting and bundle hashing to actually maximize usage of browser cache.

If you have code splitting many chunks will remain the same.

There's a bunch of ways FB mitigates this.

Thanks siblings, for letting me know about FB’s use of code splitting and how it helps caching.

I would bet that js bundling and splitting might prevent that from being true?

Perhaps but thankfully not all webapps are like Facebook.

Not so, refresh the page to see how large the second download is (much smaller)

With a standard 4G/FTTH connection that's less than one second of download time.

Everyone have 4G and Fiber, and a Core i7 and 16Gb of RAM :) Seriously…

That's not what I've said, and I somewhat agree with the original point, but this trend of wanting to cater to the lowest denominator rubs me the wrong way.

Some guys think the web should be usable with a 50€ smartphone on GPRS, and I say no, because there's a middle ground.

How about just caring for the real world instead of the numbers provided by the internet provider? Those download numbers are for the best case scenario. And unlike broadband 4G is not reliable at all.

> because there's a middle ground

So where's your middle ground?

>Some guys think the web should be usable with a 50€ smartphone

You went to the other extreme though. Most people in high-income countries don't even have FTTH.

Have you read anything about Facebook’s emerging markets? They want to cater to those people themselves!

The web should be usable on a 28.8k modem from the mid 90s. Why wouldn't it be?

There is absolutely no excuse. The app is not doing protein folding, its merely showing text!

Surprise, many many ppl use facebook in crap laptops, fb is popular with everyone.

No, it's not merely showing text. Facebook does a thousand things more than show text. You could argue those features don't belong in Facebook, but you can't argue that features are supposed not to take up any space, because that's unrealistic.

If I have to download 5mb of js for every page I visit on my phone I would be out of data in less than 15 days.