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.
replyTragic
replyIf 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.
replyThere's also Epiphany web browser for cross-platform desktop support and the Fulguris browser for Android.
replyIt is noticeably faster, but Chrome is the new Internet Explorer in more ways than one, and many web pages don't work in WebKit browsers.
Posts like this makes me feel like I’m using a different World Wide Web than everybody else. Where are all these pages that don’t work in WebKit browsers?
replyI use Safari as my main browser, I open Chrome only when I encounter a web site that doesn’t work in Safari. It happens maybe once or twice per year, and half of the time, it turns out that it doesn’t work in Chrome either.
Chrome is the most advanced browsers on each platform. For example I have hundreds of tabs
And chrome is the best at saving up RAM in the backgrouns
replyIt's just closing the older tabs and re-rendering them from cache, when returned to. WebKit does the same thing.
replyApple 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...
replyThat 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.
replyIt'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
replyIt's not really using it for much text, though. It's mostly buttons and controls, which GDI, QuickDraw, and Motif did much better back then and newer toolkits like GTK, Tk, wxWidgets, DWM, Cocoa, etc are great at today.
reply> It's not really using it for much text, though.
replyThat's exactly the opposite of my perception—for instance, it's been used to render help/support databases on my Mac for at least twenty years.
Is that why settings search has been broken for years across iOS and macOS?
replyWeb browsers come preinstalled and come embedded throughout the os.
replyBut, 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
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