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Comment by ho_schi | Hacker News Reader

8GB RAM would be enough. If not companies searched and found a successor for Flash. Is is Electron! It wastes memory, it is slow, it doesn’t integrate to Linux, Windows and MacOS and it allows to deploy bloated JavaScript locally. But it is cheap for them!

Basically the target of companies is avoiding to employ programmers for native applications. These people cost money. And optimization cost money. So they opt to waste our resources. The new ThinkPad/MacBook with soldered RAM does cost us a lot but not them.

And if you just use Googles Chrome - which made all this possible with V8 - you still have a problem. Every website believes it is okay to load JS from literally everywhere and show any kind of animated media. Plus no ad-blocker.

And us, opening hundreds of tabs with Epiphany, Firefox, Safari or Chrome ;)

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It's not the point, but it doesn't hurt that, at least on macOS the 'real native' APIs are... terrible! SwiftUI only just got rounded borders this year https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71744888/swiftui-view-wi.... People here complain about CSS, but that's been a platform feature since like 2003.

On Windows the UI toolkit story is just as much of a pain, with microsoft reinventing the toolkit every other year, and it still lacks basic layout features solved in CSS.

Oh. Microsoft invents new APIs and don’t maintain them. Win32, MFC, WinForms, WPF, WTL, WinUI - What is the next? Therefore Windows looks like a patchwork and is hard to use. And half of the UI is literally still Win2k. For applications by others anyway no rules exist.

Linux? Gtk and Qt are maintained for years. They deprecate the old stuff and then a new major release is published. While the old release is maintained and they even care about keeping Gtk3 and Gtk2 aligend and bugs fixed. People complain about upgrades - but actually there are updates and upgrades.

PS: Don’t mention Silverlight.

Unless it lacks the ability to give a MacOSX Look & Feel, I don't see a problem.

Unfortunately, that's kind of the case. SwiftUI on Mac looks like ass

https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1557357661171204098

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/SystemSettings.html

electron is quite heavy, but still it will be fine with a few hundred of ram. Electron enabled many people to write cross platform applications with relative ease and now there are projects like tauri that want to achieve that with using less resources.

Wasting users time (factor: 1000) instead of developers' time (factor: 10) is cheaper for company, but it's not an advantage for society. It's why I use Mac OS, you can find quality native apps still. Stuff like Things 3, Bear, iA Writer, Doppler,...

Forced “refresh to update” is the point. No supporting 2-10 years of legacy clients. And bypasses enterprise IT update restrictions.

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