It's just that we have to make space for our 5,358 partners and the telemetry data they need.
Electron everywhere.
And analytics. And offloading as much computation to the client, because servers are expensive and inefficiency is not an issue if your users are the ones paying for it.
I saw an ad request with an inline 1.4 MB game. Like, you could fit Mario in there.
Web "Apps" are also quite bad. Lots of and lots of stuff we're downloading and it feels clunky.
Sometimes that's bad coding, poor optimization, third party libraries, or sometimes just including trackers/ads on the page.
I vaguely recall a recent-ish article that an average web page is 30mb. That's right, thirty megabytes.
It's amazing how much faster web browsing becomes when I run PiHole and block most of it.
Suddenly the TV is pretty snappy, and all browsers feel so much smoother.
Some devs will include a whole library for one thing instead of trying to learn another way to do that thing.
from * import *
Paypal has 500 mb and just shows a number and you can press a button to send a number to their server.
It's insane
Check out the apps Hermit and Native Alpha. They make web pages run like an app. I've only run into a couple sites where they don't work right.
Cheaper & faster development by leveraging large libraries/frameworks, but inability to automatically drop most unused parts of those libraries/frameworks. You could in theory shrink Electron way down by yoinking out tons of browser features you're not using, but there's not much incentive to do it and it'd potentially require a lot of engineering work.
Yeah, though the joke is funny, this is the real answer.
Storage is cheap compared to creating custom libraries.
Yep. Apps are 20x bigger with no new features...that you are using.
Let's not forget that the graphics for applications has scaled with display resolution, and people generally demand a smooth modern look for their apps.
Ads and trackers
Fucking Chrome/Electron is why.
I honestly wouldn't mind that if they could all use the exact same runtime so the apps could be a few MB each, but nooooo.
See: Webview2
Unfortunately, it is extremely painful to work with😔 Enjoy rolling your own script versioning and update systems instead of using squirrel et al
Edit: I think Tauri works by targeting this and webkitgtk via their wrapper library, unfortunately I can't get my coworkers to write rust
isn't it a combination of younger developers not learning to programme under the restrictions of limited memory and cpu speed, on top of employers demanding code as soon as possible rather than code that is elegant or resource efficient or even slightly planned out
Much the latter.
Plus everything better work perfecly out of the box on any hardware, and there is a lot of different hardware. Compatibility layers are often built into the package.
Java, for instance, recommenda that you package the whole (albeit slimmed down) JVM inside the package for the target platform, rather than relying on the java runtime installed already.
The users arent expected to know any of that anymore.
Mostly the latter. We don't do any optimizations on our product whatsoever. Most important thing is to say yes to all the customers and add every single feature they want. Every sprint is spent adding and adding and adding to the code as much as we can and as quickly as we can. Not a single second is allotted to any discussion about performance or efficiency. Maybe when something breaks, but otherwise we keep piling on more crap at full speed non-stop. I have repeatedly been told "the fast way is the right way" followed by laughter. I was told to "merge this now" on multiple occasions even when I knew that the code was shit, and told the team as much. I am expected to write code now and think about it later.
As you can expect, the codebase is a bloated nightmare. Slow as shit, bugs galore, ugly inconsistent UI, ENORMOUS memory use, waaaaaay too frequent DB access with a shit ton of duplicate requests that are each rather inefficient themselves. It is a rather complex piece of lab management software, but not so complex that it should be struggling to run on dedicated servers with 8 gigs of RAM. Yet it does.
The hp printer app says it needs your location to connect to WiFi. It says it needs your location all the time when not using the app, again to connect to WiFi
I think that's to do with how permissions work.
Having wi-fi access can technically tell the app where you're located so you need to give it location access
Which is stupid because it then also gets GPS access.
Skill issue
Nailed it. Things have changed to allow cheaper (interpretable in several ways) developers to create "good enough" software as quickly as possible. If that involves inefficient frameworks, technology, and practices that unlock this, then so be it; if the "best" code is the code that makes money, and money is what corporations prioritize above all else, and there is a way to do that quicker and cheaper, the outcome is obvious and now ubiquitous. Furthermore, if nobody at the top cares, why should anyone on the ground care? The problem compounds.
Priorities are fucked.
uh, please do ask, why does opening a fucking glorified text and image processing app require 1 gigabyte of ram.
Who wrote this software? The guy from the bible who was the model for greed and gluttony? Jesus christ.
I just updated Epic Games Launcher. BEHOLD:
1st update
2nd update
Almost a gigabyte for a mostly blank interface, wtf.
It's like Moore's law. The number of bytes for a basic app doubles every 2.5 years.
When I was young, we'd get a few different games games on a single 1.4 Mb floppy disk. The games were simpler, sure, but exactly the same games now would be far bigger in bytes.
At least games make sense, as the graphics get better. Though in some cases, the compression is also better. Like PS5 games are smaller on average than their PS4 versions, even though they have higher resolution textures in most cases, just because the PS5 has better compression/decompression tech.
Better than that, the lack of reliance on spinning disks means that asset duplication and data read order is less of a requirement to reduce load times. It can still be argued that there's just too many polygons, since simply scaling things back would be plenty effective in reducing storage usage and load times.
Memory is cheap and data sells enough to many parties. Most apps are just store front for Ads and data collection.
No wonder why open source apps are quite light.
It's all because of Electron, unnecessary libraries, and just bad coders. Asus Armoury Crate weighs a lot and is so slow, but it's basically a simple app. Total Commander has much more features, but it's fast, lightweight, and consumes 9 MB of RAM.
Marketing. Corporate leadership has decided marketing knows better software design than actual engineers.
Bro, just use AI, bro, you don't need developers, bro, also skip the testing, bro, who is going to hack your SaaS, bro
Oh, they have new functionality. It's all in the back end, detailing everything you do and sending it to the parent company so they can monetize your life.
I'd argue that deploying from one codebase to 3+ different platforms is new functionality, although not for the end user per se.
I wish though that more of the web apps would come as no batteries included (by default or at least as a selectable option), i.e. use whatever webview is available on the system instead of shipping another one regardless of if you want it or not.
That topics always made me curious tho....take a sample AAA games back then has smaller size compared to shitty Unity 2D games nowadays and i wonder why ?
Because the app stores keep adding new requirements that you have to add code to deal with and it gets worse every year and seemingly every day.
There's lots of valid reasons for this.
Imo the biggest one people don't account for is this: Dev salaries are incredibly high. if you want fast performance the most optimal way would be to target the platform and use low level native code, so C++ or Swift.
It would cost you like 20x more than just using electron and it will cost you bigly if you have multiple platforms to maintain.
So it turns out having 1 team crunching out an app on electron with hundreds of dependencies is cheaper, naturally that's what most companies will do.
Don't want to use electron ? Then it's kind of the same issue except this time you're using Java and C# and you have to handle platform specific things on your own (think audio libraries for example). It's definitely doable but will be more costly than using a cross platform chromium app.
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