[Question] Why is the Mullvad client so large in filesize? (66MB)

[825i]

Just a quick question, I'll close the ticket after I get a good answer.

As the title says, why is the client so large? I realise it's now bundled with Wireguard but I remember the client being a LOT smaller previously.

What changed (apart from bundling Wireguard which is only a few MB)?

[faern]

Neither WireGuard, nor OpenVPN or Shadowsocks or any of that contribute noticeably to the file size. The vast majority of the size comes from the fact that the GUI uses Electron, which in turn bundles all of the Chromium browser engine and surrounding resources. This is a bit unfortunate. But it was the only way to get a UI working for all platforms within reasonable time.

Given that you quote 66 MiB I assume you are mostly interested in the Windows version of the app. We can go way back to the very first release of the Windows app, 2018.2. You can see that the installer for that version was 77 MiB. So it has not really increased much overall. Instead the size has gone up and down over many releases as we have upgraded Electron and added other features as well as done some optimizations here and there to cut out some dead weight.

Maybe you refer to our old and deprecated Python 2 client that has not existed for years? That one was considerably smaller indeed. But they are not really comparable in features nor looks nor security. File size is almost the only benefit that old version had. It was way less secure and it looked very ugly compared to this one.

[825i]

Thanks a lot for such a detailed answer. I didn't realise it uses Electron because it was made in Rust.

[faern]

The system service managing the security and VPN tunnels is indeed written in Rust (And C++ on Windows). The CLI is written in Rust as well. However, the GUI is a TypeScript program running on Electron.

[NilsIrl]

On an M1 Macbook, installing mullvad quoted more than 500MB required. How? Why? It would be really nice if this could be improved.

[smartynov]

I second that, dedicating 500 mb for a VPN client feels terribly wrong....

[entozoon]

Circling back to this all these years later, is it time to look into another GUI technique, or access to the CLI directly?
Electron requiring more storage than Halflife is madness..