If there's any silver lining to this, perhaps we can get a renewed interest in efficient open-source software designed to work well on older hardware, and less e-waste.
this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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RAM prices soar, but popular Windows 11 apps are using more RAM due to Electron, Web components
(www.windowslatest.com)
Morgan Freeman: ”They couldn’t”
I wish we could, but it’s tough to maintain optimism in the face of these sociopathic corporations’ seemingly ever-growing power
Open source developers are just like you and me. They'll get fed up with the bullshit and start developing things they need with the resources they have, just like they've always done.
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If there’s any silver lining to this, fuck JavaScript, fuck JavaScript wrappers and fuck all people picked JavaScript for the programming language of anything cross-platform.
It’s unbelievable I would need 6 gbs of RAM to say a simple “hello” to my friends. It used to take 300kb with IRC.
that has very little to do with JavaScript though 🤷♂️
Maybe not Javascript as a language, but the framework it requires to get applications written with it running, which is a lot. And in a roundabout way, it kinda has a little to do with the language itself, as the reason electron got so popular in the first place is because it catered to web developers who either couldn't be bothered or couldn't figure out proper desktop app devlopment, so they went with the easy short-term path. And Javascript kinda is an easy language to pick up and write simple.projects in - now, maintaining more complex applications with it is another story.,.
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I’d love to see games do this because they are clearly not being optimized. Can’t wait to see that not happen.
Good thing, I’m happy with retro games and the occasional indie.
3/5 of the way through 100% Final Fantasy II. Figure by the time I catch up to modern final fantasy either hardware will be better again or people will optimize again. Either way I got time
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Why would you do that when you can pull 50 JavaScript libraries and wrap it in Electron?
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"It sounds like you want low-end devices to be turned into thin clients for cloud-based operating systems. Do I have that right?"
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I really wish Electron wasn't as popular as it is. It's such a fucking memory hog. I mean, sure, I've got RAM to spare, but I shouldn't need that much for a single app.
Yes, it runs a separate browser instance for each electron program. Many of the programs that use it could just be a PWA instead.
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.
Yeah but companies want full control and no ad blockers. That’s why they’re pushing shoddy Electron apps over their web experiences and PWAs.
I wonder how much exact duplication each process has?
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/mm/ksm.html
Kernel Samepage Merging
KSM is a memory-saving de-duplication feature, enabled by CONFIG_KSM=y, added to the Linux kernel in 2.6.32. See mm/ksm.c for its implementation, and http://lwn.net/Articles/306704/ and https://lwn.net/Articles/330589/
KSM was originally developed for use with KVM (where it was known as Kernel Shared Memory), to fit more virtual machines into physical memory, by sharing the data common between them. But it can be useful to any application which generates many instances of the same data.
The KSM daemon ksmd periodically scans those areas of user memory which have been registered with it, looking for pages of identical content which can be replaced by a single write-protected page (which is automatically copied if a process later wants to update its content). The amount of pages that KSM daemon scans in a single pass and the time between the passes are configured using sysfs interface
KSM only operates on those areas of address space which an application has advised to be likely candidates for merging, by using the madvise(2) system call:
int madvise(addr, length, MADV_MERGEABLE)
One imagines that one could maybe make a library interposer to induce use of that.
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maybe a toggle to choose between "take some extra RAM, I'm feeling generous" and "fuck you, I'm computing shit over here" could be used to let the app know your current mood / needs ...
Memory hogging browsers usually do release memory when pressured. You can take it further by getting extensions that unload unused tabs.
The problem is electron apps that load the whole browser core over and over.
I wouldn't mind them all using HTML for UI if they'd learn to share the same one, and only load it when they need to show me something.
No, Razer, your "mouse driver" does not need to load Chrome at all times, when I'll only ever look at it once.
No, Razer, your “mouse driver” does not need to load Chrome at all times, when I’ll only ever look at it once.
It's funny; on Linux such devices work perfectly but many users complain that they "aren't supported" because there's no UI (that sits uselessly in your notification area and eats memory).
I guess the prices give us a new kind of issue ticket template; "new RAM is too expensive for me, please consider optimizing"
Less abstract, more concrete than "take less of a share please"
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It's because people want cross-platform apps and web is the easiest way to do it. Yes, you have Flutter, KML or Qt but those are often hard to work with (looking at you, Flutter) or it's difficult to find devs that can work with them. You choose web (JS/wasm) and you have plenty of devs familiar with the tools and you can support all the platform easily. I'm using Tauri for my personal projects because it's fun and easy. I could use Qt but I don't want to work with C++ or Python, at least not in my spare time. If anyone can recommend me a nice framework supporting Linux and Android and using modern language I might switch. I haven't found one.
It’s because people want cross-platform apps and web is the easiest way to do it.
Just use the website then? There already is a suitable browser installed on every system. But no, must have apps. Makes it easier to stop people from having opinions about data collection and such. And the full browser stack needs to be fully reproduced each time. It gets really ridiculous when these apps sit idly in the notification area. Not to speak of security implications because electron apps and such usually don't get timely updates.
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It's because there is no such thing as optimisation anymore. Websites are bloated to the gills with terrible animations and tracking scripts.
Programs. They are called programs . We are talking about desktop machines, not mobile devices
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Tauri is the way to go ; so that every app doesn't each embed another web browser that makes for 90% of the file size.
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Limitation breeds innovation
Just another AI agent bro, that will fix th
Out of Memory or System Resources. Close some windows or programs and try again.
I remember how the combination of Internet mass distribution of file data and the blossoming gray market for file-share applications really super-charged the technology of file compression.
I wonder if we'll see skyrocketing RAM prices put economic pressure on the system bloat rampant through modern OSes.
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Yeah, the RAM shortage is definitely to blame on Electron. Won't someone please think of the poor AI companies who have to give an arm and a leg to get a single stick of RAM!
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And here I am resurrecting Dell laptops from 2010 with 1.5gb DDR RAM and Debian
I remember when they changed the backronym for Emacs from "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" to Eighty. Megabytes. Or when a Netscape developer was proud to overtake that memory use.
What's the point of more RAM and faster processors if we just make applications that much less efficient?
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Native apps are so much better, on every platform.
The JavaScript must flow….
Meanwhile, on my Linux system I use about 20% of my ram idling around and it doesn't really budge. I've only got 16gb
I left windows just 2 months ago to use a MacBook for work.
In both computers I had 16gb of ram.
Windows usage was significantly higher in regard to ram usage.
I use today Linux is way more efficient, but after seeing similar efficiency with Mac, I’m changing my language to say Windows is extremely inefficient.
I brought a laptop from 2003 back from the stone ages. It runs surprisingly well, is up to date, and only really struggles with web stuff because of the state of things.
Antix linux running on 2GB ram, Pentium m 1.4GHz, and an SSD in an IDE enclosure. Uses about 200mb of ram. As far as being functional, the screen is small and low res, and it doesn't do these newfangled video formats. But if you consider 90% of my work life is in spreadsheets and documents and low resource applications, it really could be just fine. I'm not saying I would enjoy it if it was all I had to use, but I could if I needed to.
I have an M1 Macbook Air with 8 gb of ram, it performs great for everything I want to do with it – except for the fact that a ”few” active browser tabs are enough to bring the memory pressure to the pain point. Editing HD video? Reasonably snappy for an old, base spec laptop. Browsing a news site? Potato.
Windows Latest discovered Discord and other Chromium and Electron-based applications with high RAM usage
Lol, this is news? Where have they been the last 15 years?
In other news, the sky is blue.
This is a trade off. Many of these apps work on osx and Linux because they are browser-based. If they go back to native apps you lose that portability.
There are plenty of cross platform frameworks and libraries that don't involve web tech
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electron was a steaming pile of shit 8 years ago. still is. what's changed?
our acceptance of shitty corporate software.
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I have couple of old 8 gb sticks from my old 960 GPU pc. Is there any way for me to stick it onto my new pc and have only certain app use it and nothing else?
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