I'm a 25+ year C++ programmer, and what you're saying is nonsense. First, managing costs is an important part of engineering. More importantly, though, the use of browser engines for GUI apps isn't about JS but about the browser engine. These engines are among the best optimised and most sophisticated rich text layout engines we have. Even their high RAM usage is overstated. 1GB of RAM is 6% of the physical RAM on average hardware, and because these GUI apps are usually low-CPU, their RAM is mostly inert and can be swapped out without much impact, so really 1GB of RAM for such an app amounts to no more than 3% of the average personal machine's memory resources. Even if you can reduce that to zero, gaining 3% of memory in exchange for higher costs and compromising on presentation quality is often (not always!) a reasonable tradeoff from a pure engineering perspective.