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by abdullahkhalids 50 days ago
Yes. But it consumes at least 10x-100x more resources to run a web app than to run a comparable desktop app (written in a sufficiently low level language).

The impact on people's time, money and on the environment are proportional.
1 comments
mpyne 50 days ago
> But it consumes at least 10x-100x more resources to run a web app than to run a comparable desktop app (written in a sufficiently low level language)

Does it? Have you compared a web app written in a sufficiently low level language with a desktop app?

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Pannoniae 50 days ago
Yes. I can run entire 3D games.... ten times in the memory footprint of your average browser. Even fairly decent-looking ones, not your Doom or Quake!

And if we're talking about simple GUI apps, you can run them in 10 megabytes or maybe even less. It's cheating a bit as the OS libraries are already loaded - but they're loaded anyway if you use the browser too, so it's not like you can shave off of that.

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mpyne 48 days ago
> Yes. I can run entire 3D games.... ten times in the memory footprint of your average browser.

What about in QML, which uses Web technologies like CSS, JS and even basic HTML? The whole KDE Plasma 6 desktop is built around these technologies now and I (and many others) consider it light and high-performance.

If you saddle up those technologies in the full browser everything then it will get larger, yes, but nothing requires you to do this, just as nothing requires providing your app as a full-fat Fedora install when a distroless container would have sufficed.

Plain Javascript can be very fast and still come at relatively low resource demands and the same is true of HTML and CSS. Many "plain desktop-native" applications often end up reinventing their own variants of HTML and CSS in the course of designing the U/I anyways.

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Pannoniae 48 days ago
It's better, but it's still quite bloated, to be honest. Linux is generally more memory-hungry than Windows because of how modular it is, and having no Win32 equivalent really hurts. Although they've started doing UI in React Native over there too...

Qt is much lighter than your Chromium-based stacks but all the waste kind of adds up.

"just as nothing requires providing your app as a full-fat Fedora install when a distroless container would have sufficed" Containers are hungrier than running stuff on bare metal...

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mpyne 48 days ago
Yeah, React Native is apparently how Claude Code operates (even on terminal) so it wouldn't surprise me to see it being useful in a native GUI context as well, if we can get more bindings than Skia.

> Containers are hungrier than running stuff on bare metal...

Containers are tremendously lightweight compared to VM. You might as well point out that running a full multiuser security-protected OS like Linux is hungrier than running on bare metal with DOS too. It's just as true, and even proportionally as true.

In any event a full Fedora container with all packages installed is going to be tremendously larger than a distroless hello-world "built" around Alpine, for instance, even though they both use container technologies. Same applies to Web technologies, you can certainly go and easily add a lot of waste using them but they are not themselves inherently wasteful.

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skydhash 50 days ago
I believe Firefox use separate processes per tab and most of them are over 100MB per page. And that's understandable when you know that each page is the equivalent of a game engine with it's own attached editor.

A desktop app may consume more, but it's heavily focused on one thing, so a photo editor don't need to bring in a whole sound subsystem and a live programming system.

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