> electron developers are going to understand how to use browsers, but fixing the browser itself is the way to make it use less RAM.
This to me is the crux of the issue. Github has a lot of great engineers but they're less likely to be versed in C/C++/whatever else is required to make this kind of thing truly succeed.
It really begs the question of what Microsoft were thinking the day they decided to build Code on it.
Microsoft is thinking of portability as a primary. Also VS Code is a way better experience than Atom after having given Atom many chances. Microsoft wants to build tools anyone can use to enhance usage of their cloud platform offerings from any OS.
They’d already built a web based editor for cloud dev and ported it to electron as a desktop app afaik. They didn’t set out to make an electron editor.
I don't think servo will help much in the long run. It's just that web is too complex a platform with tons of APIs, technologies and edge cases to support. Any full fledged web engine will always be heavy. I think Electron (or something that wants to displace it) should give up on support web platform on Desktop, pick a limited subset of it and run with it. Yes, we won't have the ability to bundle web apps as desktop apps anymore but that's exactly what will fix the mess. We don't need a way to turn a website/webapp into a desktop app. We need a way to make it very easy to port a webapp to a desktop app will little effort. The key is to make the knowledge transferable, not the actual code as is.
Maybe if they switch to Servo it might use a little less RAM, but inherently it's always going to be pretty heavy.