On disk yeah, sure. But you're gonna render them into a pixel buffer which lives in memory.

How did applications do it before? Like in the 90s or 00s

WAY lower resolution screens so pixel and frame buffers were a tiny fraction of the size, non-composited graphical environments which meant there was one fewer frame buffer per window, and a visual style which typically emphasized large pictures/animations less.

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nicoburns 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They had fewer graphics, and much lower resolution screens.

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Dylan16807 an hour ago | parent [-]

Windows 98 SE kind of went overboard with the graphics (remember Active Desktop?), and a common screen size at the time was 1280x1024. But if you run modern stuff at 1080p (60% more pixels) or 720p (fewer pixels), you're not going to see comparable memory use.

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mort96 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Windows 98 wasn't composited, which makes a huge difference.

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.

	▲	Dylan16807 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Compositing means you can excuse an extra dozen megabytes per megapixel of window size. The window in the article is less than a megapixel. That factors in the relevant part of screen resolution too. High resolution assets should scale alongside window size too, adding a fraction of the above dozen megabytes. And I'm saying 98SE already had image-heavy design sensibilities all over. You don't have to highly hand optimize to run a weather UI in a lean way.

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vel0city an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> and a common screen size at the time was 1280x1024

Maybe if you were really rich and only used high end desktops. A lot of the computers I used back then were still 800x600, fancier ones were 1024x768. If you happened to also have a 2D accelerator card you'd potentially have 1280x1024. And lots of apps purposefully ran at a much lower color depth, it was common for games to run at 8 or 16 bit color mode.

	▲	Dylan16807 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I saw a lot of computers set to 800x600 but I don't recall any that couldn't be switched to at least 1024x768. Which is still quite close to 720p for making this comparison. And yeah lots of fullscreen-ish things ran in lower color, but this is about desktop mode and I never saw a desktop mode that struggled based on color depth.