What's easiest for both users and developers is royalty-free video formats.
AV1 is solution to these video format licensing problems. Microsoft is part of the Alliance for Open Media: https://aomedia.org/about/members/
Dolby has made direct threats to the royalty-free status of AV1: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/av1s-open-royalty-fr...
So Microsoft and all the AOMedia members will need to defend AV1 if they want it to remain royalty-free.
That's how a lot of software gets done these days. More bloat, less features, lots of inconsistencies.
This is a leadership problem, not a technical one.
I expect there's someone out there who tiles 10 instances of simultaneously playing audio/visual media, but that's not most of us.
Given that 8GB machines are still widely in use (and will get even more common over the next years), 250MB of extra RAM use is a pretty huge portion of user's available RAM pool, so this is quite a big change.
Considering the way Microsoft's product line is these days, I have a hard time believing its terabytes of "telemetry" go anywhere but the Windows equivalent of /dev/null.
Famous last words.
The price of RAM skyrocketed in the last months. The users will care.
The programs shipped with the OS should be exemplary versions of each thing.
Using 400 MB of RAM vs 100 MB of RAM is close to unnoticeable in a world of a GB+ for a single Chrome tab... And if "easier for our developers" means the end user is getting more regular updates with fewer critical issues, then it's not an uncomplicated tradeoff at all, parts of it are actually synergistic.
Isn’t VS Code an Electron app? Or just its predecessor?
If they would provide that (with security patches of course), then they wouldn’t need “quick startup” and other bullshits to make things “quicker”.
The PCB layout program wasn't cutting it with Win 3.1 and 8MB. The bloat has me always circling back to that.
Apple when faced with the issue of C++ obsolescence started working on Swift. Google developed go. In theory Microsoft has C# but can't seem to settle on GUI toolkit. So now they've decided to use webshitten for applications. I think it's possible that is going to sink Microsoft.
Thanks for this term, I vote for it to be the technical term of the last decade.
Software made in 2005-2015 is no less capable than that today, except the lack of cloud cancer and AI gimmickry. "Downgrading" to those is actually a real upgrade today!
I just think taxes have proven to be highly nonideal unless they are levied against some added-value being realized, but you're giving me ideas.
You could perhaps partially tax based on value too, but it could start to get confusing and unfair again.
Either way, taxes would probably turn out to be more of a parasite in terms of how it can overwhelm the value added if levies rise far beyond relative insignificance. Regardless of what good might come of it on the surface looking at the code.
The code itself is already regulated anyway, I would rather see a minor adjustment to the regulation where only code in an open-standard low-level language can be copyrighted.
You wouldn't even need to add enough taxes for negative incentive if the higher-level stuff was set free, that would unleash incredible resources.
That might be one of the most effective ways to reverse the exponential increase in resource-hogging, with greatest urgency.
Couldn't do it overnight, probably have to roll it back against a timeline, one layer at a time. Simulate the reversal of the metastization as logically as can be done from this point.
There's just no way we should have ever needed more than 100mb of C: drive space as long as you wanted to run your office with no further features than Windows 95 with Office 97. To be generous another 100mb for multimedia and another 100 for internet, plus the OS and Microsoft apps are supposed to get more efficient from there since they were rushed to market in the '90's themselves.
Gigabytes were supposed to be for storage and media files, and there was never supposed to be any latency of any kind as soon as processors got up to 1GHz and you got off dial-up. Mice with balls were all that was necessary too, and that was with IDE HDDs.
All you can do is weep for what could have been.
I doubt that's viable, honestly... At that point, just don't use microslop software
#StopTheBloat #StopTheOffshoring
> This new software replaces Groove Music and the classic Windows Media Player across all Windows 11 PCs.
I thought I might have been undergenerous, but I just looked it up, and people report Windows 11 really does idle around 4GB RAM on a fresh install. Geeze :(
Last year I paid money to upgrade my laptop's RAM from 16 to 32 GB. I didn't pay it so apps could just be more bloated without offering any significant benefit.
Developers should respect and be efficient using hardware resources. There are no excuses for that.
How much do you want to bet you don’t even use windows media player? It’s fake outrage and if you care that much use VLC.
VLC on my Mac uses about 130 MB of RAM (as reported by Activity Monitor) to play a FLAC file, and about 300 MB to play a high-bitrate 1080p MP4 file. The audio file memory consumption frankly seems high, but it’s fine, and apparently 1/3 that of WMP.
More directly, do you not find it odd and embarrassing for a tech giant to be unable to beat a bunch of volunteers? I mean, ffmpeg famously hand-writes a lot of assembly, but it turns out Microsoft could absolutely do that as well if they really wanted to. They could produce performant, native apps; they just choose not to.
Not without reason VLC is considered to be a memory hog.
Great, so now that SSD I've got can wear out more quickly!
> It’s fake outrage and if you care that much use VLC.
Already do. My heart still aches for those who don't know any better.
It's come and gone, and I'm still not fully sure what Groove Music was; was it something to do with the Zune?