I seriously don't understand making blanket statements like this

All this fearmongering made me properly look at and note the memory usage of the native windows app and then the electron app after I upgraded. The new app uses a whopping 50MB more when the desktop app is open and uses 10MB less when it's not

People keep ranting and raving about this with no context and zero research. I'm sick of this especially on HN

It's not about the memory use. It's about the insane complexity.

An old grandma is looking for a little city car to take her to the neighborhood store. Solution: Use an Airbus A380. The fact that the engineers have made the plane weigh only 50 times as much as the city car is great, but it doesn't really change the fact that it's a crazy approach.

I don't have strong feelings about Electron, but 50MB more memory for the same functionality does seem like a lot. If every app I have open on my machine suddenly used 50MB more memory, it would be a noticeable hit.

But it is not the same functionality at all. In terms of privacy and security, the older versions do not come close. And we reworked many pain points in 1Password 7 — better lock screen, improved sidebar, new watchtower, item editing, (in)security questions, fully encrypted item icons, item location bar, tag autocompletion, special handling of the scenario where 1Password becomes locked in the middle of the editing session — and I am not even listing 10% of all the improvements here.

Note that that's 50MB more when the 1Password window is open. When it's running in the background it actively uses less memory than it did before. And that effectively means 99% of the time it's running faster than it did

How is it different than using a GUI framework like Qt or GTK?

Qt and GTK apps don't usually spawn 5 processes, 300-400 MB of RAM, and take 100+ MB of disk space (because they always ship an entire copy of Electron) just to show a small window.

Then it's not electron the problem, it's the way the package was created. There is no reason it couldn't be distributed as a shared library.

Are we really comparing the bloat of Chromium to Qt & GTK?

They solve the task at hand (cross-platform GUIs), plus some auxiliary tasks like cross-platform FS access etc etc. That's much cleaner and more principled than "screw it, let's ship a browser".

The runtime is much much smaller, fewer layers of.abstractions away?

If each app bundled its own build of Qt then it wouldn't be.