I think if something is possible to do given better hardware, no matter how bloated or useless, developers at large will end up doing it. I don't think RAM usage or performance are concerns for the people that go straight to Electron because in the present it's easy develop for and nobody has the right to force them to chose otherwise. Electron isn't going away; the only ways it improves are Chrome getting more performant or computers getting even faster. Either one is nontrivial to work on as an outsider - there are only two significant browser engines in the present age because they've become so complex and accumulated so many features that they require the support of well-funded corporations to maintain them, and computer processors can only become so small.
Browsers on the whole will not lose features. The web is ubiqutous and cutting down the number of features to maintain would break existing webpages. The resulting web standard establishes a hard baseline on the amount of complexity needed to engineer a standards-compliant browser. That in turn means a hard baseline on the amount of processing power required to run it acceptably, save for more performance gains that will surely be buried immediately under even more features.
I once tried using Firefox 1.0 and found it was impossible since it has no understanding of modern security protocols. The web as viewed by Firefox 1.0 in 2003 no longer exists. You can't practically divorce the features necessary to use the web such as new protocol compatibility with the extra features like Pocket in the code changes. And trying to do so anyway leads to Pale Moon where a scant few contributors are responsible for merging in dozens of security patches - which themselves come about due to the growing complexity of the web platform. Numerous people have called using it irresponsible from a security standpoint. In the end the endless growth of web standards and the code needed to support them has made that fact a necessary one.
For all practical purposes, you either use one of the two major browsers or get left behind by coders and organizations that have orders of magnitude more resources than you.
Society and the economy don't incentivize creators with being happy with a modest amount of features if there's a glaring increment in performance that ought to be seized on. It's about growth and innovation. Finding new ways to reinvent the wheel and get further away from the hardware, because it's now easy to.
Sometimes I wish we could undo growth. It would be nice if Electron and the like fall out of favor and we have a renaissance of software like it was designed in 2004. But enough developers have decided that the performance tradeoff is worth it, and average users have become desensitized to SPAs and their expectations are low enough that they would rather put up with it all in order to do what they need to instead of demanding better.
I feel like it can only keep growing. That's one thing the collaborative nature of software pushes forward. More features. It's just that some are better at limiting the scope of projects than others.
I have explicitly said that I will refrain myself from browser as it is uncomparable. The whole browser based infrastructure is so bloated (from browser which can be treated as vm, to bloated, text based, human readable language (thank god for someone to push webasm - I said it is necessaty in 2001 but everyone was fine in hacking together js for next ~20 years, now it came to the electron absurdity of 100mb+ applications that run js on packaged browser on operating sytem that runs on cpu, the overhead is just incredible) to text based protocols (http! rest!). Nodejs? I wont even start. The waste of cpu power, electricity, hardware,... is just fantastic.
On the other side, android sdk/framework/whatever looks like bunch of academics pouring their frustrations into one library - if you want to learn all patterns just dig in. MFC 6 in 1998 was more organized (https://t1.daumcdn.net/cfile/tistory/11781B244C45903F42 please try to draw this one for android! No vision, just chaos. Oh you loose context with orientation? How nice...). Android development environment catched what Windows Mobile had in 2000 barely when they pulled in IntelliJ (which is copy of visual studio) while for machine code they still lack behind. Please, DONT believe any of this, DO check VS 6.0 and Windows Mobile. Everyone is reinventing everything without/ignoring past and its mistakes, repeating them over and over again. Loosing 20 years for the sake of another corporation gaining monopoly is so crazy that you need to see it with your own eyes.
Cloud. We had mainframes. Enough said. We are moving to those again, for short term profit for users and long term profit for providers. I wonder when affordable server hardware will dissapear from market.
While I think that hardware industry is moving forward, the development is racing backwards or barely catching what we had 20 years back. Drowning itself in lasignas and stacks of different overheads, from overdesigned interfaces to VMs. IoT is still sane (due to lack of resources to waste) but the common software development just went crazy.
I do suspect that at some point, hardware will stop supporting bloating due to physics limitations and optimized code will come back, but I wonder who will still remember how to write it? Ah, we will reinvent it again?!
But nevermind the rant of an old fart. He just doesn't understand waiting on cpu 1000 times faster than what we had at 50% while loading megabytes of web based software doing what he would implement in 100kb. With 0.0015% of cpu load. It is just him. He doesn't understand the hype.
Browsers on the whole will not lose features. The web is ubiqutous and cutting down the number of features to maintain would break existing webpages. The resulting web standard establishes a hard baseline on the amount of complexity needed to engineer a standards-compliant browser. That in turn means a hard baseline on the amount of processing power required to run it acceptably, save for more performance gains that will surely be buried immediately under even more features.
I once tried using Firefox 1.0 and found it was impossible since it has no understanding of modern security protocols. The web as viewed by Firefox 1.0 in 2003 no longer exists. You can't practically divorce the features necessary to use the web such as new protocol compatibility with the extra features like Pocket in the code changes. And trying to do so anyway leads to Pale Moon where a scant few contributors are responsible for merging in dozens of security patches - which themselves come about due to the growing complexity of the web platform. Numerous people have called using it irresponsible from a security standpoint. In the end the endless growth of web standards and the code needed to support them has made that fact a necessary one.
For all practical purposes, you either use one of the two major browsers or get left behind by coders and organizations that have orders of magnitude more resources than you.
Society and the economy don't incentivize creators with being happy with a modest amount of features if there's a glaring increment in performance that ought to be seized on. It's about growth and innovation. Finding new ways to reinvent the wheel and get further away from the hardware, because it's now easy to.
Sometimes I wish we could undo growth. It would be nice if Electron and the like fall out of favor and we have a renaissance of software like it was designed in 2004. But enough developers have decided that the performance tradeoff is worth it, and average users have become desensitized to SPAs and their expectations are low enough that they would rather put up with it all in order to do what they need to instead of demanding better.
I feel like it can only keep growing. That's one thing the collaborative nature of software pushes forward. More features. It's just that some are better at limiting the scope of projects than others.