The modern web so fat that when it sits around the house, it sits around the shockingly robust infrastructure we've collected that provides us great convenience while it slurps up our privacy.

I don’t know how youtube does it, but decoding a video, say with libavcodec(ffmpeg) without GPU acceleration is pretty demanding. They could do it on their server and send you the stream, but then again they’d save a lot of money not doing that.

But I agree it shouldn’t take so much when nothing is happening, the web has very much become so bloated.

i think the biggest problem with electron is that it doesn't just use some system-provided browser library, instead every electron app ships its own browser environment, which takes up a lot of space each time and makes the whole system a whole lot less efficient. shared libraries exist for a reason.

While idle RAM usage can be an indicator of background load, RAM that's not in use is RAM wasted. Best is for idle memory to cache files, libraries and programs for faster load times than to sit unused