Is there ongoing work to reduce the memory footprint of Electron apps? I'm genuinely curious.
Isn't Electron basically Chrome, so the ball be in Chrome's court on that?
That said, I really think that web development in general, including Electron needs a reboot. From my perspective as a user, everything seems to be full of bloat and memory leaks. Maybe some kind of redacted version of Javascript that's harder to screw up? If worse is better, lets at least try to refactor the worse crap we adopted to actually make it better.
It seems many users hope to eventually see the ability to run multiple Electron apps on a single instance of Chromium.
Now instead of the JVM, we've these rather beefy runtimes due to Chrome, Node.JS, Javascript (v8)... which if you look at it, do the same things applets did, except different.
I think the problem w/cross platform is that we want to have everything look 'native' for the platform.. and when you demand that, hooking into the native APIs is sort of inevitable. Instead, I believe rendering probably ought to be done by the runtimes themselves, sort of like JVM did w/AWT/Swing..or like Dart is doing right now.
There's always going to be a trade off when wanting to have a single app that runs cross platform and maintain a native look/feel to it... Quite frankly, I'm not sure which is best, but I lean more toward 'do your own rendering' and port the runtime to run across platforms, kind of like the JVM ...except w/Chromium/V8/Node.JS. Sure it hogs memory and its slow... but I think most devs will take that over having to develop multiple apps doing the same thing per platform.
1) Java applets were awful to use in the browser
2) The DOM is the most advanced and flexible (and, yes, resource-hungry) UI layout system ever created. Seriously. Swing didn't come close in terms of the sheer breadth of possible interfaces one could create.