The rendering engine in Windows is accessible. It has not been as advanced as V8 but it is getting better and that means you can, or will soon be able to, create an app with html+css+js and run it on Windows without downloading a full engine.
For the more common solutions I think computers already have enough memory to handle this. The boot time is a bit too long but if each app uses 200-300 MB does not mean _that_ much when the computers have 8 GB or more.
HTAs, or HTML applications, almost forgotten, have been available as far back as xp and possibly windows 98. They still work in windows 10, though they only support html4 and very limited JavaScript, and obviously aren't cross platform like electron.
Microsoft saw the potential in html for building apps way back in the late 90s. You used to be able to use html as a wallpaper back in windows 98, something I dearly miss.
It's also worth pointing out that uwp / windows store apps can be built in html/js, which are very small to distribute and use a global rendering engine
> Have you tried using 3 Electron apps simultaneously on 8GB machine?
I have done this, and it worked fine. In fact, I had three instances of vscode, slack, gitkraken, Spotify and headset all running concurrently on a windows machine and it didn't melt. I'm tired of this myth that electron takes 1gb per app
It's over half a GB for freshly opened messages app. Give it a full day and I'm sure it won't let you down. Compare that to the previous native version:
For the more common solutions I think computers already have enough memory to handle this. The boot time is a bit too long but if each app uses 200-300 MB does not mean _that_ much when the computers have 8 GB or more.