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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

There’s probably a big marketing opportunity for anyone who can make more memory-efficient alternatives to some of the bloated apps that have normalized the need for >16GB RAM in a desktop computer.

Alongside dark mode, apps should have a “slim mode” that turns off some of the more wasteful features in order to run on older/smaller hardware.

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I feel like the market of apps and websites has usually been irrational about bloat because developers tend to have beefy machines. It required a beefy machine just to use Twitter without lag, and now X is the same. In the 2000s it was excessive Flash instead, or Java for apps.

Some sites like Google were able to measure the user-engagement cost of slowness and chose to optimize, but they're exceptional. I doubt most businesses know the cost.

Same for phone. I don't think anyone tests their websites on older devices anymore. Many sites have become useless, because it assumes that you have a massive screen, a modern GPU and plenty of memory. There's no point in having a video as a background, or load an excessive amount of Javascript, just to show me a news feed.

No one cares anymore, and I doubt that any hardware supply bottlenecks will improve that. It's not something that anyone care to measure.

They might be finding that there's more engagement on phone apps than phone website. That could just be because the phone website sucks, but idk, maybe people are really used to downloading apps. Someone on HN mentioned they went all-in on a PWA then realized nobody wanted it.

I don’t think it’d be the worst idea to require devs to regularly test against something like a late era Core 2 Duo or i5-2500 machine with 4-8GB of RAM on the equivalent of a 3G connection. A lot of improvement could be netted from that alone.

It'd help, but leadership would have to commit to actually caring about those metrics, which would only work if dev envs are portable enough to run on the slow test machines before it's launch day. Otherwise the only real way is to give devs slow machines.

It's called native applications and has been around since before the days of web app wrappers. Just stop using Electron and you're halfway there already.

Still dont see the point of using electron for mobile apps. Just make a webapp and be done with it without having to jump through the app store hoops.

Yeah it's worst of both worlds really.

Only point is to get access to native APIs and a distribution channel. Tauri is far better than Electron if you want to ship a web front-end as either desktop/mobile.

I doubt there's any kind of a set of features that can be turned off to reduce the memory footprint by any significant amount when most of the memory bloat comes from the application running its own instance of Google Chrome.

Yeah, so don’t do that.

"Please hire a $100,000/year native developer for each of my three preferred ecosystems" is usually the good intention that paves the road to Electron.

this used to be a thing right? social media apps used to have a 'lite' edition, facebook, tiktok, something else

and when android go was thing there were (are?) lighter apps targeting that like google maps go even

they still exists, although google is phasing out some of the Go line of apps

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