Isn’t that just the same pig, just wearing different makeup? I’m not a fan of msedgewebview2.exe allocating 500+ MB RAM just because Teams is open, but maybe that’s Teams fault…
Not quite. instead of a bundled pinned version of electron, it is an arbitrary version of edge’s WebKit fork shared across all programs using it. That means you don’t need to keep multiple copies of the webkit libraries loaded into memory.
That’s not to say that building things on web technology is an efficient use of resources. Even if multiple programs are sharing the webview2 library, they’re still dealing with the fundamental performance and memory problems caused by building an app in JavaScript.
As for why teams is so memory hungry? I would blame Teams.
Discord manages to make a half decent, highly responsive webview app, and that’s with the overhead of having its own separate instance of electron.
EDIT: the original poster was also talking about application binary size, not runtime memory consumption. Application binary size should actually be significantly helped by linking webview to instead of bundling electron.
I mean, Object Pascal was doing the “write once, run anywhere” thing decades ago. Java, too. The former, especially, can make very small programs with big features.
The alternative is “just serve it as a regular website”. It doesn’t need to be an app to do its job. Name a functionality which only exists in electron but not in the standard browser API.
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 that just the same pig, just wearing different makeup? I’m not a fan of msedgewebview2.exe allocating 500+ MB RAM just because Teams is open, but maybe that’s Teams fault…
Not quite. instead of a bundled pinned version of electron, it is an arbitrary version of edge’s WebKit fork shared across all programs using it. That means you don’t need to keep multiple copies of the webkit libraries loaded into memory.
That’s not to say that building things on web technology is an efficient use of resources. Even if multiple programs are sharing the webview2 library, they’re still dealing with the fundamental performance and memory problems caused by building an app in JavaScript.
As for why teams is so memory hungry? I would blame Teams.
Discord manages to make a half decent, highly responsive webview app, and that’s with the overhead of having its own separate instance of electron.
EDIT: the original poster was also talking about application binary size, not runtime memory consumption. Application binary size should actually be significantly helped by linking webview to instead of bundling electron.
400mb iphone banking app entered the chat
Is there any alternatives to electron ? And why people’s doesn’t move on to alternatives if electron is huge & heavy resources ?
I mean, Object Pascal was doing the “write once, run anywhere” thing decades ago. Java, too. The former, especially, can make very small programs with big features.
The alternative is “just serve it as a regular website”. It doesn’t need to be an app to do its job. Name a functionality which only exists in electron but not in the standard browser API.