Technology

I would be interested in seeing how you have it set up that firefox or linux are using any substantial amount of ram. That wouldn't have anything to do with 'badly written code'.

Correct! The difference is the OS.

Windows is a ram hog. Using 4GB or more just to exist. Linux uses 1-2GB, sometimes less.

Microsoft FORCES electron web components.

Linux has choice.

So yes, linux has electron as well, but Linux is a lot lighter and nowhere near a hog like windows.

It does, but you can stick to IRC instead of Discord for example

Don't remind me, I am high on copium right now. I can't even play any of my steam games, but I have my Miyoo Mini+, so I'm surviving haha

I mean, ymmv. The historical flood of cheap memory has changed developer practices. We used to code around keeping the bulk of our data on the hard drive and only use RAM for active calculations. We even used to lean on "virtual memory" on the disk, caching calculations and scrubbing them over and over again, in order to simulate more memory than we had on stick. SSDs changed that math considerably. We got a bunch of very high efficiency disk space at a significant mark up. But we used the same technology in our RAM. So there was a point at which one might have nearly as much RAM as ROM (had a friend with 1 GB of RAM on the same device that only had a 2 GB hard drive). The incentives were totally flipped.

I would argue that the low-cost, high-efficiency RAM induced the system bloat, as applications could run very quickly even on a fraction of available system memory. Meanwhile, applications that were RAM hogs appeared to run very quickly compared to applications that needed to constantly read off the disk.

Internet applications added to the incentive to bloat RAM, as you could cram an entire application onto a website and just let it live in memory until the user closed the browser. Cloud storage played the same trick. Developers were increasingly inclined to ignore the disk entirely. Why bother? Everything was hosted on a remote server, lots of the data was pre-processed on the business side, and then you were just serving the results to an HTML/Javascript GUI on the browser.

Now it seems like tech companies are trying to get the entire computer interface to be a dumb terminal to the remote data center. Our migration to phones and pads and away from laptops and desktops illustrates as much. I wouldn't be surprised if someone finally makes consumer facing dumb-terminals a thing again - something we haven't really experienced since the dawn of personal computers in the 1980s.

But TL; DR; I'd be more inclined to blame "bloat" on internet web browsers and low cost memory post '00s than on AI written-code.

Or, even better, let’s start developing for separate platforms again, and optimise software for the platform that’s going to be running it. Rather than just developing everything for Chrome.

This is what bothers me so much... Browsers should be improving their PWA implementation (looking at you, Firefox) and electron apps should be PWAs more often. Another decent middle ground Is Tauri. SilverBullet and Yaak are both so much lighter and better than anything else on my system.

The article mentions Chrome/Chromium: 9 times
The article mentions Google: 0 times

Google made Chrome. Chrome had that multi-process architecture at its core which allowed to consume as much memory as needed even on 32-bit OS. Chromium was always inside it and open source. Then they created CEF, which allowed webdevs to build "real" apps, and that opened the floodgates. Electron was first built on it but they wanted to include Node and couldn't because it required too much experience in actual coding. So they switched to Chromium. It didn't change much in the structure, just basically invited more webdevs to build more "real" apps (at 1.0 release Electron advertised hundreds of apps built with it on its website).

Google could do something about how the web engine works in frameworks (that don't need that much actual web functionality), but didn't. They invited webdevs to do anything they want. Webdevs didn't care about security because mighty Google would just publish new Chromium update eventually. They never realized they don't need more security in their local "real" apps gui that connect to their websites because there is not much room for security danger in such scenarios. They just always updated the underlying engine because why not. Chromium dll is now at 300 mb or something? All of that code is much needed by everyone, is it not?

So, for me the sequence was always seen as this:

Google (caring about webdevs, not OS) ->

Webdevs (not caring about native code and wanting to sell their startup websites by building apps) ->

Reckless web development becoming a norm for desktop apps ->

Corporations not seeing problems with the above (e.g. Microsoft embedding more stuff with WebView2 aka Chromium)

So yes, Google has everything to do with it because it provided all the bad instruments to all the wrong people.

Personally, I don't care much about hating Microsoft anymore because its products are dead to me and I can only see my future PCs using Linux.

CoMaps is a good alternative to Waze. If you think it isnt make an OSM account and help make it a good alternative :p