Download size is relatively harmless; size on disk is an annoyance and a real concern (a lot of laptop users have an SSD in the 128-256 GB range); but memory footprint is the real killer for me. I don't want every little widget to consume hundreds of megs of memory.

In 1995 my computer had 8 or 16 MB memory... Having a 1 MB app running in the background would have been huge. I certainly don't want to go back to that era.

Memory footprint is my big issue with this too. Related, I've noticed chat for various projects slowly migrating from IRC to Slack and have the same issue there. What could have been another irssi window taking up an insignificant amount of memory is now a 150Mb Chrome tab.

To make matters worse, memory growth has stagnated. A Macbook Pro today, to give an example has the same maximum RAM (16Gb) it did in 2010. That's zero memory growth in 7 years for a popular developer machine.

Wouldn't regular Chrome have the same issue? Each tab is a full instance... your argument is against Chrome and web apps, not Electron.

No, it's different.

Each Chrome tab is a process, but they share the same dynamic libraries in memory. Each Electron app is both a process and a separate copy of the dynamic libraries.

If you run half a dozen Electron apps, those redundant libraries will be taking up roughly a gigabyte already.

Chrome splits itself in various processes and usually each tab has a process. But each process is not a full Chrome instance. There's a huge difference.