this is true, I even remember one of the first alternative clients for Discord (Ripcord IIRC) was orders of magnitude more performant and lightweight that this rust rewrite.

200 tabs of HTML only?

Came here to say the same thing. A graphical IRC client should not require 290MB of RAM to run.

if it has a lot of iamges and videos, maybe? but not after a clean startup

You actually couldn't, because browsers did not support tabs back then.

200 browsers instances more likely.

I'm pretty sure my Pentium 3 PC back in the day had 128 or 256MB memory, and I ran tabbed Mozilla/Seamonkey as well as the first versions of Firefox ("Phoenix"), both with tabs. 2003ish.

Cold Phoenix start on Windows XP was similar to Firefox startup today on a Mac :D (ok, maybe a few seconds longer of pegging the CPU)

Windows XP was the follow up to Windows 2000.

Yeah, and it took up to 2006 for IE to support tabs.

Anyway, by then Windows 2000 already had its replacements on Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003.

Opera definitely had them around that time

https://pspb.chrisrcook.com/2025/09/20/4_windows-xp-home-x86...

On Windows XP.

Opera supported win 2000 until 2010s.

Might be, however the comment I replied to implied any browser on Windows 2000.

https://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/opera-did-no...

And? I never said Opera invented tabs (I knew they didn't).

And it wasn't on Windows 2000 heyday.

Opera and Firefox, "actually", introduced tabs around the same time as, or very soon after, the launch of Windows 2000.

Alternatively, read "tabs" as "windows" - we know the word "tabs" is not the important point of that post (and that the number 200 is exaggerating for effect). Right clicking a link and selecting "open in new window" opened a new window in the same browser instance, not a separate instance, although there wouldn't be any visual difference.

Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 were the current versions at the time.

> People need to understand even a 70% smaller 290MB GUI app is still terrible

I don't understand that kind of reasoning.

Electron - and anything web - has allowed us to basically solve distribution and iterate at lightning speeds and people are getting bothered because an application in 2026 takes multiple amounts of RAM than the their favourite 90s app?

Come now, the average laptop has a ton of memory and fast i/o to be able to not care even if that 290MB was 1290MB.

The trade off of higher memory for some middleware is totally worth it.

Software developers need to realize that their app is not the only one that will be running on the user's computer. A single app taking 300 MB of RAM? No problem. 20 apps? That's already 6 GB of RAM.

And keep in mind we're talking about a damn chat client, not some complex video editing or CAD app.

> Software developers need to realize that their app is not the only one that will be running on the user's computer

The user will need to realize that, and if they don't like it they will close the app and move to a different provider. But that of course will not happen because no matter how the IT people want everyone else to use their xmpp xfce clients or whatever; Slack will always triumph because it is not just a "damn chat client"

> 20 apps? That's already 6 GB of RAM.

No one runs 20 apps in the foreground, my finance runs gsheets, xero and the erp all of which are webkit. The lenovo's were the cheapest ones I could get with 8gb ddr4 and still no one has complained about slack or our erp written in react not being responsive enough.

I understand that people like to constrain themselves for creative reasons but lets not be cheap with resources.

Do you honestly consider this normal? In the 00s I've used to run Windows XP (which was derided as an absolute pig -- what the hell did we know) + Delphi with a GUI designer in it much more advanced than anything we have now + 1-2 PDFs + a web browser with maybe 5-10 tabs + often a chat client in the background (usually QIP -- it supported not just one protocol like Slack, but about a dozen of them, and could send and show multimedia messages in addition to text).

Sometimes also a music player. All of this relatively comfortably fit in 128 MiB of RAM; it was really comfortable once I moved to 512 a few years later, and I thought that should be enough for the decades ahead.

But then we got electron and turning the web into an operating system on top of an operating system.

Now having a document processor barely fit within 8 GiB is considered acceptable...

Normal or not that's how it is. The incentives are not there and the network effects close the casket...

Is it regrettable? Idk. Definitely not unique to software though once you look and appliances, cars etc

Wish it only took 300mb. Actually that is the minimum.

Teams is a nice example. It will eat 1-2gb of my memory on a regular day. Being limited by 16gb and trying to work... It's not fun.

I recently installed "dvdisaster" from Debian. The provided version has the GUI disabled, on the grounds that it's written in GTK2. It's just a single-line configuration change, so I recompiled with the GUI enabled.

It's been a long time since I last used GTK2. I was shocked at how much faster it feels than GTK3/GTK4 apps. Load time is almost instant on my old computer, and no perceptible latency anywhere. There's no arbitrary 60fps frame rate cap like with more recent GTK versions (while running on Xorg). There are no annoying animations. GTK2 was already perfect and everything since then has been a downgrade.

Congrats, you finally made it 15 years late to the "Gnome 3 sucks" party, you can still grab a drink and a chair, it's still lively in there!

Linux Mint ftw