> I couldn't open 3 images like that without running out of memory.
This isn't a great comparison because you're counting the fixed overhead of the browser as well. If you have three tabs open with other images, it won't take 3x the memory.
Personally, I virtually always have a Chrome instance running on my desktop, so the overhead is incurred either way.
In Electron there is fixed overhead for running Chromium for each program, but it's a stripped-down instance without all the bells-and-whistles of a browser, so it's not as high as it would be for a full browser.
> This isn't a great comparison because you're counting the fixed overhead of the browser as well. If you have three tabs open with other images, it won't take 3x the memory.
This is a good point, my bad. Most people would open multiple images in the same piece of software (though it seemed like more memory was used in comparison to GIMP anyways). A more realistic take on my part would be running X different pieces of Electron based software, which would use Y% more memory than native alternatives.
That's not to say that there can't be good and comparatively efficient software like that out there, Visual Studio Code is a good example of something that actually performs pretty well! But that's mostly because of the huge amount of engineering that MS put into it, most other similar approaches like Brackets or Atom were plagued by sluggishness.
This isn't a great comparison because you're counting the fixed overhead of the browser as well. If you have three tabs open with other images, it won't take 3x the memory.
Personally, I virtually always have a Chrome instance running on my desktop, so the overhead is incurred either way.
In Electron there is fixed overhead for running Chromium for each program, but it's a stripped-down instance without all the bells-and-whistles of a browser, so it's not as high as it would be for a full browser.