alt Hacker NewsEight gigabytes is orders of magnitude more than an OS could ever use, or even the pre-installed software. It's web browsers and the software that uses them that occupy all the RAM, and those are usually made by third parties.
Open a few news web pages, and run Discord, Slack, VS Code, etc, and you'll quickly run out of RAM.
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ben-schaaf • today at 6:48 AM
Apple is no stranger to using a web browser for basic OS functionality. Several pages in the settings app are actually WebKit, source: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-ma...
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throwaway27448 • today at 7:27 AM
Web browsers come preinstalled and come embedded throughout the os.
But, webkit is much better than chrome in memory usage. If only we could force slack and vs code to use the engine better suited for the job.
Ironically these are all text-based applications where the actual content on screen is in the order of a few hundred bytes. They've managed to reach a bloat factor of one million.