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WhatsApp is the worst app on your Windows 11 PC right now, eating 1.2GB of RAM doing nothing
(www.windowslatest.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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Without having read the article, lemme guess... Electron.
Maybe now that no-one can afford RAM these companies might get motivated to do something about that. Hell, I'd accept them just feeling shamed into not being the worst memory hog on your system at this point, over any altruistic reason.
See also: Discord and Slack, two other colossal wastes of space that use an order of magnitude more RAM than a native app would while running slower and providing absolutely zero other benefits.
Interestingly, in Microsoft's Build Conference this year, they were pushing for "Native applications" again. This is probably two fold, one because RAM is getting so expensive we'll probably start seeing 8GB laptops again, and two because AI will make something in whatever framework you tell it to, and has no problem maintaining separate code bases for each supported OS. Of course, that just means more tokens used as far as Microsoft is concerned, which is a win for them.
The worst part about electron is that there is no way for it to share resources like a browser. You have to oacjage the whole version together, when really should should have been more like a pwa. Instead you have 10 electron instances, running with 10x the respurce needs.
that's why you just skip the middleman and run it in your browser instead.
my friend has 16gb of ram and he keeps hitting out-of-memory errors when he has like 5 apps open, because they’re all electron and they all take like 2gb each, it’s ridiculous
Your friend has disabled the swap file. Never a good idea.
To be honest I'd rather get OOM errors in my consumer OS than endless disk thrashing. At least mechanical drives were more resilient and you could hear the thrashing, as opposed to silent massive wear on your SSDs.
I run 32GB and I still run a swapfile. My ssd is still going after 3 years, but everything dies.
My SSDs are like ten to 15 years old, none are dead at this point. The cargo cult of swap files trashing everything.
They don't care if you can't afford it. Data centers are buying them by the truckload.
OP was talking about the software companies, not the ram companies