Software has gotten bad over the last decade. Electron apps were the start but these days everything seems to be so bloated, right from the operating systems to browsers.

There was a time when apple was hesitant to add more ram to its iPhones and app developers would have to work hard to make apps efficient. Last few years have shown Apple going from 6gb to 12gb so easily for their 'AI' while I consistently see the quality of apps deteriorating on the App Store. iOS 26 and macOS 26 are so aggressive towards memory swapping that loading settings can take time on devices with 6gb ram (absurd). I wonder what else they have added that apps need purging so frequently. 6gb iphone and 8gb M1 felt incredibly fast for the couple of years. Now apparently they are slow like they are really old.

Windows 11 and Chrome are a completely different story. Windows 10 ran just fine on my 8th gen pc for years. Windows 11 is very slow and chrome is a bad experience. Firefox doesn't make it better.

I also find that gnome and cosmic de are not exactly great at memory. A bare minimum desktop still takes up 1.5-1.6gb ram on a 1080p display and with some tabs open, terminal and vscode (again electron) I easily hit 8gb. Sway is better in this regard. I find alacrity sway and Firefox together make it a good experience.

I wonder where we are heading on personal computer software. The processors have gotten really fast and storage and memory even more so, but the software still feels slow and glitchy. If this is the industry's idea of justifying new hardware each year we are probably investing in the wrong people.

Firefox is set to allocate memory until a certain absolute limit or memory pressure is reached. It will eat memory whether you have 4GB of RAM of 40GB.

Set this to something you find reasonable: `browser.low_commit_space_threshold_percent`

And make sure tab unloading is enabled.

Also, you can achieve the same thing with cgroups by giving Firefox a slice of memory it can grow into.

Fair. I installed a MIDI composition app recently that was 1.2 GB! Now, it does have some internal synthesis that like uses samples, but only a limited selection of sounds so I think 95% of the bulk is from Electron.

I for one don't remember software ever being very good. Windows XP crashed all the time and needed frequent formats due to all the viruses (all antivirus software) that made it unusable. Win 2k was even worse. Old MacOS's also crashed frequently. Old Linux's had barely any hardware support. In fact while I agree that software is more bloated than ever, it also seems more stable than ever thinking back to what was before.