How can it be that electron is bloated and terrible and resource inefficient, but "average users" who "just want to browse the web and use web apps" don't need a powerful computer?
The web is probably the most resource intensive thing my computer does. A text editor and interpreter/compiler is lightweight in comparison.
@pointlessone oh yeah good point that each electron app a duplicate browser (idk why it's not more popular to ship a wrapper that uses the system browser as a rendering engine instead of Chromium).
I do still think that novice users == web apps == low resource requirements is a lazy generalisation
@willhbr There are but they only solve the disk space problem. They still run a separate browser in each process. It only marginally solve the memory issue (the executable image might be shared) as the system browser still has significant per-process overhead.
On the web apps point, I agree. We used to run a whole word processor in 8 MB of RAM. Google Docs easily hit 50x of that. For most people both have more features than needed.
But static webpages—documents—can be tiny. In the KBs range. Even modern ones.
@pointlessone I guess you _could_ have some IPC system that would allow sharing one browser process between apps, but maybe I've just invented ChromeOS.
Static web pages _can_ be tiny (if I removed web fonts my site would be <10kB) but basically no one cares about optimising for size this much (even me, given I serve 90kB of fonts)
Will Richardson
PointlessOne 