The year is 2023. Every program on your computer is now an Electron app, running vulnerable out-of-date versions of Chromium and consuming 500MB of memory each
Tears spring to your eyes, but you fight them back. "No," you say to yourself. "I simply must buy more RAM." You'll do it, right after you pay off this Ukrainian ransomware
@nolan "Oh wait," you say.... "I'll just go download moar. What a time to be alive!"
@nolan there's still not enough ram in your laptop to support that....even though it's 2023...
@nolan can you backport that memory optimization from the future? I hardly see ones beelow 1 GB.
@nolan which doesn't matter because you have 8 TB of RAM :)
@nolan Then those apps are run in containers in containers in containers.
@chris come at me bro, I'm behind 5 walls of containers
@nolan The only Electron apps I use are the ones that wouldn't really makes sense as a web app (IDEs such as Atom or Visual Studio Code, or apps like Hyper).
@mlcdf VS Code is based on Monaco which is already a pretty dang good editor: https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/
I really feel like if someone just invested more in IndexedDB / browser file system APIs / etc. then even this could be done as a web app. https://glitch.com/ is already a really interesting step in that direction. 🙂
@nolan More like 2GB of memory each and maybe with baked in bug, acting as a backdoor, which then installs a worm, which is a ransomware.
And then you start to think how to buy new RAM.
*looks at computer*
Oh, there's no more RAM slots left.
🤔
@nolan s/computer/smartwatch
@booc0mtaco is this a Black Mirror episode
@nolan s/2023/2017/g
*fixed.
@nolan then... what can we do ?
@AirDur Build for the web instead: https://whatwebcando.today/ 😉
@nolan Firefox tooks a lot of RAM too. And for what I want to do, a lot of feature isn't available yet.
But I need to end my school before. I hope browsers will improve. :)
@AirDur At the very least browsers are getting really good at throttling background tabs (https://github.com/WICG/interventions/issues/34) and about not spinning up a ton of resources for every single website. But yeah a lot of webapps are not super heavily optimized (I've been looking at improving the Mastodon codebase for instance; it's not bad but could use some improvements: https://gist.github.com/nolanlawson/d8541c6e818c8eb6e440d6a25c02987e)
@nolan isn't that chrome Os?
@nolan the Electron MotherZygote has replaced SystemD and schedules all of its Electron children, page-swapping every time you move the mouse
@nolan thank christ for that gazillion gig RAM though
@ohyran in 2023 you're gonna need it
@nolan lol at the innocence and optimism of expecting RAM use to be constrained 500mb ;)
@nolan Do you think browsers are close to adding the missing native pieces to make electron unnecessary?
@d Absolutely: https://whatwebcando.today/ That's not to say there aren't missing pieces (e.g. we need true desktop PWAs to give webapps Cmd-Tab/Alt-Tab), but I also think the value of the web as "our install process is just clicking a link" can't be overstated. :)
@nolan that's ok, because we all have 128gb of ram. I mean, who would ever need more??
@nolan That's okay. They'll all be running as Snaps in Docker and chrooted. Perfectly safe.
Distantly you recall something called a "web browser" with "tabs" that you could switch between. Your left hand involuntarily twitches towards the Ctrl and Tab keys, driven by a deep longing for a past joy which you can no longer name