alt Hacker NewsThere’s probably a big marketing opportunity for anyone who can make more memory-efficient alternatives to some of the bloated apps that have normalized the need for >16GB RAM in a desktop computer.
Alongside dark mode, apps should have a “slim mode” that turns off some of the more wasteful features in order to run on older/smaller hardware.
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It's called native applications and has been around since before the days of web app wrappers. Just stop using Electron and you're halfway there already.
this used to be a thing right? social media apps used to have a 'lite' edition, facebook, tiktok, something else
and when android go was thing there were (are?) lighter apps targeting that like google maps go even
I doubt there's any kind of a set of features that can be turned off to reduce the memory footprint by any significant amount when most of the memory bloat comes from the application running its own instance of Google Chrome.
I feel like the market of apps and websites has usually been irrational about bloat because developers tend to have beefy machines. It required a beefy machine just to use Twitter without lag, and now X is the same. In the 2000s it was excessive Flash instead, or Java for apps.
Some sites like Google were able to measure the user-engagement cost of slowness and chose to optimize, but they're exceptional. I doubt most businesses know the cost.