That's also bloated, couldn't they find a better comparison to illustrate the egregious waste?
But yeah, I still remember when a weather app would take 10 MB and I was complaining (1999)
The world doesn't run on personal aesthetics, when nobody is willing to pay for them.
But if you build it natively, you should have all of Microsoft tools at your disposition, dlls and such. In theory, this should allow you to make a 1 mb app or less. But in practice, it's the worse option.
3840x2160x3x3.5. That's 87MB, in pixel data only. And it's a very minimal example; for the parallax image, you're gonna want the image to be significantly taller than the window; you're gonna want a ton of smaller (tho still DPI) images for icons; a few different font atlases for different font faces you've loaded at once; maybe pre rendered pixel buffers for all sorts of UI components; etc.
And lord help you if your designers want any part of this to be animated.
(I'm playing a bit fast and loose with what lives on the GPU and what lives on the CPU here. On many systems, they share a memory pool anyway. But on systems with discrete GPUs, most of this is gonna be video memory. Though applications may wanna store CPU-side copies as well for various reasons.)
And to be clear, there's a ton of unnecessary bloat today as well. It's just that even a lean and mean highly hand optimized native app is gonna be way bigger today than it was then, due to compositing, higher resolution assets, higher resolution screens and different design sensibilities. But most apps aren't lean and mean highly hand optimized native apps so.
Looking at the opposite extreme, the guy that originally wrote the windows task manager (the thing that popped put when you pressed ctrl+alt+canc) posted a video about cloning the windows basic text editor in a 3kb binary: https://youtu.be/OG91c7xsNMc
Needless to say, the guy knows what he’s doing.
Really Microsoft? Do you really need all the ads revenue from the weather app?
What’s next? Ads on the start menu?
And it makes the middle manager happy because it lets that middle manager report better numbers to their superiors again.
Etc.
It's why all large dysfunctional organisations do self destructive stuff like this.
They already exist: https://www.howtogeek.com/windows-11-start-menu-ads-how-to-t...
The window in the article wasn't very big. At most it would have about 10MB of framebuffer, and the images on display would fit into 1MB uncompressed.
We can't excuse typical program waste with screen sizes. Especially when you can switch to 1080p or 720p and watch them still use massive amounts of memory.
Back in my day 100MB was all you had for all your compute, and somehow programs still ran.
Things weren’t actually worse.
They "could" make it easy but why bother? I assume next update will make calculator 1 gb download, 2gb ram resident and ADS
https://web.archive.org/web/20010210023051/http://www.softse...
https://web.archive.org/web/20070210195451/http://www.locutu...
Which matters because the things most consumers are doing on their computers haven't changed in the past 15 years. We browse the web, edit photos, message friends, and so on. AI generally runs on remote servers anyway.
For years, everyone kept saying it was fine that Electron used gigabytes of memory, because on modern PCs memory was plentiful anyway. Well, it's not plentiful anymore! Maybe it's time software developers actually used resources efficiently?
Hey, you even have an LLM to help you now!
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/scientist-say...
...when looking at nominal prices (ie. not adjusted for inflation). If you adjust for that the furthest back you can go to get that price is 2011. What's more is that because RAM prices are subject to boom and bust cycles, that price has also been reached in 2015. So just by tweaking two parameters we went from 19 years (2007) to 11 years (2015).
For more than 15 years in the past, the price in real US$ of DRAM per GB was always higher than today.
During 2014, there was a brief price peak when DDR3 (the standard current then) was slightly more expensive than DDR5 is today.
Still, the fact that now the price per GB is the same as 15 years ago, is bad enough, and it can still become worse.
Electron was never a great idea but more and more basic things keep moving to it and the result is a disaster. When you use it for several little things at once it turns from annoying waste into massive waste.
Today 8GB is bare minimum.