Comment by dlcarrier
7 hours ago
Eight gigabytes is orders of magnitude more than an OS could ever use, or even the pre-installed software. It's web browsers and the software that uses them that occupy all the RAM, and those are usually made by third parties.
Open a few news web pages, and run Discord, Slack, VS Code, etc, and you'll quickly run out of RAM.
Ironically these are all text-based applications where the actual content on screen is in the order of a few hundred bytes. They've managed to reach a bloat factor of one million.
Tragic
If you decry bloated web apps and use Chrome on their Mac... there's Safari. It's far more efficient and has a far snappier UI.
4 replies →
Apple is no stranger to using a web browser for basic OS functionality. Several pages in the settings app are actually WebKit, source: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-ma...
That reminds me of Microsoft's Active Desktop in Windows 98, when the desktop had widgets that were web pages and would show webpage-related errors when something went wrong. We've really gone full circle over the last three decades.
It's not so much "full circle" as we never came up with a better way to render general purpose rich text content than html/css to begin with
1 reply →
Web browsers come preinstalled and come embedded throughout the os.
But, webkit is much better than chrome in memory usage. If only we could force slack and vs code to use the engine better suited for the job.
Isn't Slack just mIRC with a skin? /s