[cotelletta]

It's easy. The text is marked up, mixed in with images, video and other miscellaneous rich content, and includes remote resources and third party embeds.

There is no native UI toolkit that can do this properly, nor is there a cross platform way for 3rd parties to integrate even if there was. So web it is, with a runtime designed for being able to rapidly page in/out the entire UI from one screen to the next, even if that is entirely unnecessary for a single app.

Grouches have been shitting on the web, not entirely for bad reasons, but it's made them miss the fact that web has been stealing their lunch for a reason. If you live inside a terminal, your needs have diverged from the majority, and you're likely relying on crutches that are considered impossibly clunky by most.

The only ray of hope here is what FB has done with React and React Native, but I imagine it will take another 10 years before the unix geeks will want to admit there is something in that "webshit" worth looking at.

[stephenr]

macOS Messages (aka iMessage) has been rendering text chat using HTML views for years, and it doesn't use gobs of memory.

The problem isn't that the text part is rendered using HTML. That actually makes sense - multiple desktop applications that compose/render user generated rich content rely on HTML (or something converted to HTML) and a web view of some description to render that content: mail, chat, etc.

The problem is rendering the entire application's chrome using Web technologies, and then running all of that inside a web view from a browser that is known to have the resource usage of a porcine creature with an eating disorder.

> The only ray of hope here is what FB has done with React and React Native

No. The ray of hope is that people realise web technologies are not the best choice, and the way they're used in Electron is fucking atrocious.

[arvinsim]

> macOS Messages (aka iMessage) has been rendering text chat using HTML views for years, and it doesn't use gobs of memory.

Keep in mind that the OS and the hardware it runs on comes from the same company that does iMessages. You shouldn't discount the amount of control that brings.

Contrast that to people who have to work with different OS platforms and hardware specifications.

[stephenr]

Adium did exactly the same thing - rendering chat contents using HTML. It also didn’t use gobs of memory.

The hard work of optimisation has been done by apple, any app can embed a web view for content and take advantage of the optimisations in the system html renderer.