Linux: Separate lightweight tray/notifier from the full WebKit UI
What would you like to add or change?:
Please reintroduce a lightweight tray/notifier process on Linux instead of keeping the full WebKit frontend running in the background.
Right now Portmaster starts: portmaster --with-prompts --with-notifications --background
and on my system the WebKitWebProcess sits at roughly 970 MiB RSS / 924 MiB PSS, while portmaster-core itself uses only about 150 MiB.
Ideally, the tray/notifier should handle status, notifications, prompts, pause/resume and launching the full UI, while the WebKit UI should only start when explicitly opened.
Why do you and others need this?:
A GUI that I open maybe once every six months really has no business permanently consuming nearly 1 GiB of RAM just so an icon can sit in the system tray.
Portmaster historically had a separate lightweight notifier, and that architecture made much more sense for a background security application.
Source: safing/portmaster