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by embedding-shape 29 days ago
> Browser rendering engines are pretty mature at this point, with significant GPU acceleration, and over a decade stress-testing by bloated web apps.

Even so, there is a stark difference, even more so on low-powered devices, between native apps and even the lightest of browser apps. I'm traditionally a web developer, but started developing native cross-platform applications the last 6-12 months, and the performance gap is pretty big even for simple stuff, strangely enough.
1 comments
trinix912 29 days ago
My experience too, and that's not even touching the disproportionately high RAM usage of frameworks like Electron. Sure, "unused RAM is wasted RAM", until the system starts swapping heavily because of the high RAM usage.

It doesn't even have to be old devices, there are still laptops being sold with 8GB of RAM in 2026.

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cosmic_cheese 29 days ago
Electron would be fine… if most of us were running just one electron app.

In reality we’re stuck with 2-5 electron/CEF apps plus whatever is running in browser tabs as well as whatever webviews system stuff are running, which all quickly pushes into VM paging territory on low memory devices.

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whstl 29 days ago
This is so true. It even happens to me in my 16GB work laptop when I have to use multiple Electron apps at work. My personal 8GB Air is way faster.

On the other hand, WebViews can be really fast without the baggage of Electron and Javascript frameworks/libraries.

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domga 29 days ago
JavaScript frameworks/libraries are very rarely the problem, Electron just has to bundle Node, V8 and Chromium (granted, V8 is deduplicated).

Electron apps are hungry for RAM, but in practice it is close to having a heavy tab active. The thing about browsers is that they are pretty aggressive at offloading inactive tabs but Electron apps never do that.

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