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RAM prices soar, but popular Windows 11 apps are using more RAM due to Electron, Web components
(www.windowslatest.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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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.
Yeah I just can't stop getting ragebaited by the Electron hate. All Electron haters are free to develop their own efficient, pleasant looking, cross-platform native app instead since it's so easy
It's because there is no such thing as optimisation anymore. Websites are bloated to the gills with terrible animations and tracking scripts.
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.
WebBluetooth, WebUSB, WebSerial and the File System Access API aren't universally available in Browsers for example.
Tauri would be a lesser evil compared to electron, but that then involves libwebkitgtk.
It is a good solution for some apps but if you need to store data locally, use push notifications, run something in the background or access any native APIs you have to go with a native app.
All major browsers can do this - with the exception of running something in the background I guess. But that is exactly the sort of usage scenario where an Electron app is the worst choice. Coding a separate utility with no GUI would be the sane thing to do here, not put whole browser stacks into memory.
Pretty sure PWAs can run in the background.
You're actually right, by now browsers have APIs to do most of the things apps do. Technically you could convert most apps to websites. I guess as a user I just don't want all my apps to open a tab in my browser. I want to move apps between virtual desktops and monitors independently and I don't want my app's window to be clattered by all the menus from my browser. On mobile I also prefer switching between apps than between different tabs. For me the best compromise is:
All this is already possible with most browsers.
Do you know any websites that integrate into Linux desktop and Android like native apps? I mean I can run it from cmd/icon, and it opens as new window without any decorations? I never saw it but if it's works fine it's an interesting option.
Those are called Progressive Web Apps (PWA). You can use firefox to add the website to your desktop like this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps/Guides/Installing
Once you do, when you open the app it should have just the website without the tabs and everything else firefox does.
So I checked and my app done with Tauri uses 50MB of RAM. Simple PWAs I've checked using
about:memoryin Firefox use 40-50MB. Native apps done with egui or iced use ~25MB. The difference is really small and taking into account all the advantages of Tauri (more mature framework, easier packaging, better DX, better components library) I'm not very motivated to learn a native library just to save 20MB of RAM. PWA would be an interesting option (very similar to Tauri but maybe with easier distribution) but in the near future I want to work with Android Auto so I will need to work closely with native Android API and I already know how to do it with Tauri.And the extension requires a package from a 3rd party repo. Probably that's why I missed it until now. It works nice on Android though. Maybe I should do a PWA... But it's like... learn new tools, host it somewhere... I will think about it. Thanks!
Programs. They are called programs . We are talking about desktop machines, not mobile devices
I have been really enjoying working with Avalonia, it is a .NET library that works across windows, Linux, and Mac and allows you to use C# for desktop app development on those environments. Its what MAUI should have been.