> If both navigator and composer were rather large and you > have to download both or nothing, then that would be still > be bloatware - because many megs were added without > giving you a choice. > > Classic example is Windows with Internet Exploder bundled > in. Microsoft made the same argument you made - that IE > has many common functionalities with Windows. > > On the other hand, if composer /was/ small, then Navigator > may have been poorly designed for it to reach 10 megs on > its own. Still bloatware - so many unnecesary megs. > > It would /not/ be bloatware if Nav were less than 5 megs, > and each of the other components, no matter how large, > were optional downloads.
How big is the Nav module without debug code? Once you strip out all the development stuff, and leave just the actual program? Mozilla is a big project, and I'm guessing there's a lot of labelling as to what everything does, what needs to be done, etc. inside of the codebase which would be removed or at least slimmed down a LOT in any commercial distribution (obviously a small number of people who know the code would need fewer instructions and lables than a large group of people from diverse backgrounds.) You can't really judge bloat until you see an optimized build. Personally, I think separating a composer xpi would be a good idea - it'd obviously need to be installed for HTML functionality in mail-news, but I wouldn't be horribly upset if I couldn't compose mail/news in HTML. It'd just mean that I'd never see the "do you want to send this in HTML" message again. Patrick
