#2268·portmaster

Linux: Separate lightweight tray/notifier from the full WebKit UI

Author: Nex7053Created Sep 15, 2026Updated Sep 15, 2026
Labelssuggestion

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.