But the performance is worse. I point out the example of a small spreadsheet. Open it in Google sheets, and you are using 1/2 gigs+ in ram plus heavy cpu. Open it in a desktop app maybe you will use 20 to 30 mb of ram, and low cpu usage.
The things you pointed out are the problem. On RAM-heavy machines you're right, it's not noticeable and can even be a performance boost. The problem is that same app is run on machines with all kinds of capacities and system loads.
The funny thing about some apps is they enable different strategies based on the hardware available. It's why a Chrome tab will use 1GB of RAM on a beefy machine but also run fine on a a machine with 1GB total RAM.
Yeah, but that code still sits in memory, occupies space and takes non-zero time to load. It also takes free memory from the fragments of code that are on the critical path. Sometimes it doesn't matter (most desktop apps), sometimes it does (embedded software or system-level programming). Also, RAM usage of quite a lot of kinds of software is determined mostly by code size, not data size (e.g. word processors, spreadsheets, CAD software, IDEs, compilers) and startup-time is also determined typically by loading and dynamic linking time.
People use what they have, I won’t blame them for it. (Although the notion that web apps—such as Facebook, GMail, Google Docs, or PDF.js—are less resource-intensive than “normal” desktop usage does not seem to hold much water to me, and those are usually included when a machine is said to be used “just for web browsing”. So if the experience ends up quite miserable I won’t be surprised.) But I’ve shopped for a laptop for a relative some months ago and am a bit testy about how manufacturers seem to be saving money on frickin’ RAM (or more realistically segmenting the market using it). Just... don’t fall for it if you have a choice.
Its hard to know without comparison apps, but if it means you aren't just running everything in a browser (and thus, way higher memory usage and likely much crappier native-OS behavior if any at all) -- yes
I completely agree that most of them are extreme memory hogs. I was just pointing out that the previous commenter's definition of a desktop application made almost no sense to me.
Yeah... I opened a 500KB log file in vim and Notepad++ and they are using 5 MB and 7 MB of RAM, respectively. They both also manage to use no measurable amount of CPU (even to blink the cursor!) unless you interact with the window.
If we are doing anecdotes, a single tab Google doc with Grammarly running can easily surpass 4Gb of ram, especially if the doc is over about 30 pages. Use cases like that are not particularly uncommon.
We're talking about RAM. RAM usage is a direct function of how many apps you have open at the same time. For an iPad that number is a lot smaller than for a laptop.
Much lighter and more responsive and uses a lot less RAM. I can't reasonably keep the normal viewer open in an 4GB RAM computer together with other tabs and programs. And I suspect a 2GB computer would just explode on the normal viewer even if that was the only tab open.
Indeed, but is relevant? If you have a machine with average memory installed, both are fine. If you have something with very little memory available, both would be too much.
Apps built 30 years ago use less RAM because they had less RAM available: 16MB (1993) vs 16GB (2023). Back then, PowerPoint & other apps were considered to be the bloated apps.
Worth considering: how often do you actually use those old apps?
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