There’s a nifty new Electron alternative called Tauri which purports to be more memory efficient than Electron! Competition is awesome!

Tauri is written in Rust and utilizes a webview instead of bundling the entire Chrome browser within it.

Using a webview isn’t a particularly new idea - DeskGap, Electrino, Neutralino, and others. On Linux, this works pretty okay! You get a webkit rendering engine (of an unknown version). On MacOS you get the Safari flavor of webkit. On Windows 7 you often get IE11 which.. yikes. Then on earlier Windows 10 you get the old non-Webkit Edge, newer versions mostly get Webkit Edge. It’s.. a little all over.

The big thing that Electron brings is that you know exactly what version of Webkit you’re building against and can cut down on the pain you feel when testing.

The other thing is that Electron has a lot of batteries already included and while Tauri has a lot of features in the works - they just aren’t there yet! However, the roadmap looks great and who knows - maybe it’d really hit that right balance between performance and features without having to write a native app version.

I dunno, though, I feel that Electron being resource hungry isn’t the end of the world. For the most part, you can cut down on memory in Electron in the same way you would a standard web app on Chrome - through profiling and optimization.