My first computer saved data to a cassette tape; today, terabyte hard drives are nearly give-away prizes in cereal boxes (yeah, I know they don't do that anymore, either). We have machines in our pockets which are arguably (in some ways) more powerful than the machines only government-funded agencies and such could afford when I was a kid (and they took up entire rooms).
I hope I live long enough to think of 850 MB as a small amount of memory (and 8-cores at 4 GHz each a slow machine; actually, there are some multi-cpu server mobos I'd love to have as a desktop, but I can't afford it - yet).
Honestly, I'm amazed that we do have enough memory to support these huge apps. Sure they're bloated; I won't argue that - but at the same time its amazing that we can run them at all - a decade ago it would have seemed ludicrous!
Could it be better? Sure - but in my mind, all software is bloated - because even the simplest piece of compiled code I can't run on my old TRS-80 from when I was a kid (heck, even an Arduino has better specs!).
>xpaulbettsx: JavaScript Hacker at Slack
Ah, yes, we are all grateful for Slack's 850MB of memory used when idle. I can live without it, personally. Actually, if it could crawl back into whatever hole it came from, I'd be glad.
Electron isn't good. Electron is absolutely awful. Web applications aren't good. Javascript isn't good. At what point of dementia do you say "hey, web APIs are easier to use, let's bring the entire damn browser along with it!"? The normal reaction should be fixing current APIs, making good wrappers around them.