Oh, it’s most likely doing something. Just nothing you would want.
Without having read the article, lemme guess… Electron.
Maybe now that no-one can afford RAM these companies might get motivated to do something about that. Hell, I’d accept them just feeling shamed into not being the worst memory hog on your system at this point, over any altruistic reason.
See also: Discord and Slack, two other colossal wastes of space that use an order of magnitude more RAM than a native app would while running slower and providing absolutely zero other benefits.
The worst part about electron is that there is no way for it to share resources like a browser. You have to oacjage the whole version together, when really should should have been more like a pwa. Instead you have 10 electron instances, running with 10x the respurce needs.
that’s why you just skip the middleman and run it in your browser instead.
They don’t care if you can’t afford it. Data centers are buying them by the truckload.
OP was talking about the software companies, not the ram companies
No, the worst app is Windows 11. My parents have some all-in-one HP PC. It has some Intel laptop processor from about 8 years ago, 16GB of ram, (upgraded from 8), and a wheezy 256GB spinning drive, running Win10 adequately.
After being bombarded with “upgrade to Windows 11! It’s easy and fun!!” notifications, they did so, and of course their PC is woefully underpowered for the job.
I log in remotely and check what’s running and the OS is paging to the swap file constantly. [Edit: and I mean, to the point where opening an application takes 60 seconds of disk thrashing for a window to appear]
I had to get a de-bloat script and turn off about 50 Microsoft “essential services”. The biggest hog out of them all was copilot, which was using about 4GB while sitting there idle.
I have no doubt that I’m going to have to run that script every month as everything gets “repaired”, until I can get back to their place and put a SSD in and maybe install some flavour of Linux.
I had to get a de-bloat script and turn off about 50 Microsoft “essential services”
And then a Windows Update comes along…
My MILs computer has 8 GB of RAM… I have not yet convinced her she needs a new computer, but I did just install windows 10 iot ltsc on it so it will at least get security patches.
Install Linux, Problem Solved.
If you put in an ssd, Windows should run just fine.
Yeah, it’s on the to-do list. I still don’t like it endlessly paging though. I also hate Microsoft’s push to get everyone on win11 even if their PC’s will run like asthmatic slugs.
I have found every single PC of mine has benefitted from running Win11. Even those that don’t meet the criteria. It’s a solid OS.
If they were happy with 10 give them Mint, they won’t even notice if you skin it.
Not too sure about the ‘doing nothing’ part.
True.
Oh it’s doing plenty. Just not for you.
Why would anyone put WhatsApp on their computer?
Stop using meta people!
“Stop using meta people!” sounds like a protest chant for the second-class citizens of a B-grade cyberpunk dystopia.
All you need is a lack of comma, huh!
Why would anyone put Windows on their computer?
Anything owned by facebook is already the worst app on whatever device it’s installed on.
My Windows 11 PC? Where?
My Linux PC doesn’t have WhatsApp installed. Someone tell me where this Windows 11 PC is so I can retrieve it and install Linux on that too.
I don’t know who is doing the testing, but they don’t know what they’re doing. 313MB
Look at mr moneybags over here
Fable is so expensive. I made a Blinko notes desktop app on Opencode last night using Minimax M3 and it would have cost me 3000usd if I was using Fable.
The screenshot is from my $300 HP Elite Desk 4. It doesn’t support Win11, but I installed it anyway.
Oh, you meant Claude. I use the free version to help me write automations and dashboards for Home Assistant. I have never given Anthropic a dime.
You cannot fish in lemmy as it’s a website. Thank you for your understanding.
Can I at least get my bait back?
Your setup, with Win11 and Claude is the bait.
Why Edge? (Still Chrome)
Why Claude?
WhatsApp depends on how much TEAM your PC has and what other software is running in order to change its cache. Maybe the tester/author has a lot of RAM and saw this “huge” usage.
Personally, if I bought 64GB of RAM, by god I’m going to use it!! Why buy lots of RAM and be stingy??
It’s something I’ve always done. I pick an app. ie: Firefox but then at some point I’ll go to the alternative to see if it has something I might have missed. This way I can evaluate it myself rather than rely on someone else’s bias. I’ve been using Edge for about 3 months now, and it really isn’t that bad. I’m going to try Brave next.
As I mentioned earlier, I use the free version of Claude to help me with automations and dashboards in Home Assistant. It really is an incredible tool.
I don’t know what that means. How much TEAM my PC has? You saw what Edge was using. This PC, which basically is a boy doing a man’s job, has 32GB of RAM. It runs all of my ‘ARR’ apps.
I just don’t see the issue with Whatsapp. It runs perfectly fine of my crappy HP I7 7700 PC.
Ohhh my bad, stupid swipe text corrected ram to team I guess…
Edge isn’t a bad browser as far as functionality goes, but far from secure. But it’s gotta I discovered vertical tabs while at work, so I added that extension in Firefox and now that’s native too.
Btw, my PC has 32gb of ram where WhatsApp is using 320MB.
Oh. OK well that’s good! Idk, maybe the tester left the PC running really long or just ran a bunch of convos to rack up RAM usage for the article
When I reported my Whatsapp was using 320MB it had been running for a week. The writer is just not that good when it comes to analyzing technology. He wants to trigger outrage, which it seems he has done.
I’m shocked to learn that a dedicated browser always running in the background for a chat app uses 100x the memory and resources
Where you fucked up is installing and using WhatsApp to begin with. It’s been shit since meta bought it.
And Windows.
Exactly, if you’re still using windows in 2026, wtf are you even doing?!
Sadly, Linux currently just isn’t a one-to-one replacement for Windows, which is enough of a reason for most people to stay. (I say this as a Linux user myself)
microsoft committments to ui frameworks can be gotten in bulk, for free at your nearest flea market
It’s most definitely doing alot
The doing alot gets a lot done.
Or they’re mining your data….?
I’m not using it nor the Facebook Messenger app, but rather their messenger in the browser. Meta is an evil necessity in my country because the businesses I deal with are mostly active on Facebook, and almost all people are tethered to it, and I have to use a facade where I don’t have to give Zuck anything about myself.
