I wonder why. Given the popularity of HTML you'd think some large organization would've developed a reasonably fast _and_ memory efficient browser engine by now but everyone seems to be aggressively optimizing for speed.

Bloated specs with tons of historical cruft and edge cases. And a renderer needs to support it all. The problem stems from trying to use something designed to share documents with some custom styling as a universal GUI for applications instead.

It's possible to develop relatively lightweight browser engines. Refer to NetSurf for instance. However the ones I've seen are not what you'd consider fully-featured or usable for the average user's everyday browsing. The issues begin at implementing modern CSS and JavaScript support. Admittedly I've never looked too deeply at the internals, from what I understand supporting modern web standards is a maze of edge-cases, bug-for-bug compatibility issues and a forever moving target of feature parity with the major browsers.

I know but the apps are several orders of magnitude smaller than Electron apps, so I think it's appropriate here:

> An uncompressed Neutralino app is only ~5MB and compressed app size is ~1MB.

Indeed. Webshits alone are responsible for 1 or 2% of global energy usage.

I feel like this calibre of comment is a perfect example of the "reddification" of HackerNews recently

If it were being reddified, you'd see a bunch of people needlessly turning things into political discus--- ohh.....

> Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

_sigh_

Source?

Even disregarding the poor term you've used, I'm pretty skeptical of what you just stated. Especially with a margin error of 1%.