> I don't think you realize how slow those are, how slow they make your entire machine (eating the RAM for no good reason)

You're on a forum full of software developers, I think you can give us credit for knowing exactly how much resources the apps we use take up.

Personally, I frequently run VSCode, Slack, Zoom, Chrome, and occasionally Loom at the same time on a machine with 8gb ram and it's fine. Until one of these new platforms like Tauri or Socket.sh catches up, the trade off for developers being able to develop once and run on multiple platforms is entirely understandable and clearly acceptable to most people.

Fully agree on all points, I've never had a performance issue with Electron.

I have had Slack fill my home directory with logs once , long time ago. But that wasn't an electron problem.

Cool. I'm a single developer releasing software for free which is only made possible by Electron and wouldn't exist without it but I guess I'm just lazy.

You're lazy and you should feel bad! /s

Honest question: where does all the RAM go? If a chrome tab eats about 200 MB ram, shouldn’t an electron app consume about the same? After all Electron is just an SPA with all the assets packaged with the browser engine. Like the zip’d web archives of yore

Chrome engine is build for browsing the web multiple windows multiple tabs etc.

If you drive with a empty truck with trailer it uses more oil than a car.

Chrome is not designed for this. There are other engines like https://sciter.com that are work for single apps, but probably scale bad if they are misused as a browser.

I just opened Chrome to a news website and got 400MB of usage on the "GPU Process", 150MB on the "tab" process, and 100MB on the "browser" process. In Electron the webpage doesn't have access to native APIs like the system tray, so that's done by exchanging messages with an extra process.