Re:JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the De...
by catnaroek on Monday September 12, 2016 @01:47PM
(#12481895)
> Poorly written websites can bring a desktop PC to its knees, but so can a poorly written native application.
Even well-written Web applications tend to use more system resources than their well-written desktop counterparts. A few days ago, I was surprised to find that Chromium was using 6 GB of RAM, while all other processes combined (including three Emacs instances, running fancy modes) were using just 1GB. And, no, I wasn't playing browser games or doing anything fancy in Chromium: just viewing text and images.
> And at least with a chromeless-browser-pretending-to-be-application you have the protection of the browser process sandbox so an app that goes awry isn't going to take your computer down that badly.
It would be much better to use programs that don't need to run in a sandbox in the first place. (To be fair, OS-enforced memory protection can be considered a kind of sandboxing too.)
Even well-written Web applications tend to use more system resources than their well-written desktop counterparts. A few days ago, I was surprised to find that Chromium was using 6 GB of RAM, while all other processes combined (including three Emacs instances, running fancy modes) were using just 1GB. And, no, I wasn't playing browser games or doing anything fancy in Chromium: just viewing text and images.
> And at least with a chromeless-browser-pretending-to-be-application you have the protection of the browser process sandbox so an app that goes awry isn't going to take your computer down that badly.
It would be much better to use programs that don't need to run in a sandbox in the first place. (To be fair, OS-enforced memory protection can be considered a kind of sandboxing too.)