Open Task Manager on your Windows PC right now and chances are you’ll see apps like Discord, Slack, or Teams sitting at the top of the memory list, even if they’re not running. It’s not a bug in their code, and it’s not because your PC is old. It’s really the result of over 30 years of choices about how Windows devices are built.
Microsoft has rewritten its recommended software development plan at least seven times since the 1990s, according to former Chromium engineer Dominic Denicola in a recent blog post. He said, every new design was abandoned before developers could dig in and create a stable system. The result is that many modern Windows applications are websites dressed as native applications using a framework called Electron, which ultimately integrates a complete copy of the Chromium browser engine into every such application. It costs users RAM, battery life, and responsiveness with each installed device.
Microsoft’s framework graveyard
Amount per pivot
The main problem here is the confusion of the design. As Denicola points out, the Windows dev stack has been damaged throughout tons of coding revolutions, from Win32 C APIs to MFC, to WinForms and WPF, to WinRT XAML and UWP XAML, to WinUI 3. With each new start, developers must start again, at least until the plan is abandoned or put into something new.
That’s not the only problem, either. Every time Microsoft held back, there were many tools stuck on a broken platform, leaving devs without a secure foundation to build on for a long time. Former Microsoft CTO Jeffrey Snover calls it a system failure, and the current state is “boof-a-rama,” that is, smart people doing stupid things. Technology, he argued, was never bad, but ended up being abandoned because of internal politics, premature pivots at developer conferences, and confusing business practices that left devs out in the cold.
“A few years ago I was in a meeting with developers and someone asked a simple question: ‘What is the right design for a new Windows desktop app?'” Snover wrote in a blog post. “The silence is dead. One person suggested WPF. Another said WinUI 3. A third asked if they should just use Electron. The meeting went sideways and we didn’t answer that question. That silence is a story. And the story goes back thirty years and more.”
The .NET gap still hasn’t been fixed
Windows 11 ships with .NET 4.8.1, but developers need .NET 10
Denicola’s concrete case has a NET-type problem. In 2026, the current version of .NET is 10, but even the latest versions of Windows 11 only ship with .NET 4.8.1 pre-installed. That creates a problem for devs and their users. When users download any app built with the latest runtime, Windows forces users to download .NET 10. Another way is for developers to bundle the entire .NET runtime into an app binary, which increases the file size. Denicola uses an example of a small tool that he created that ends up being about 10 MB due to the compilation of the full machine, garbage conversation and common libraries.
So, why doesn’t Microsoft just ship .NET 10 with Windows 11? Ioic Sharma, the creator of the discussion thread clearly states: “Windows bundles .NET 4.8 as it is bug-for-bug compatible with legacy tools.”
This makes sense on the surface, but it leaves today’s creators tied without a clean resolution.
Why developers are turning to Electron – and how much it’s costing you
You use Chrome privately for each device
In addition to the native static path, developers have access to Electron, a framework that allows you to build applications using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and ship them as standalone programs. It makes development faster, runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux from the same codebase, and avoids the whole WIndows design issue.
The catch is that each Electron application has its own JavaScript engine, GPU renderer, network stack, audio pipelines, and sandboxed subprocesses. Each app opens as a full browser. That’s where all your RAM goes, as each instance of the Chromium browser increases the load on your PC. Discord has tried to solve this known problem by restarting the device when it hits four MB of RAM.
If you have Discord, Teams, Slack, and Visual Studio Code, you’re running multiple instances of the Chromium engine at the same time, each of which eats up an alarming chunk of RAM. That’s not all, either. Your CPU and battery life, not to mention overheating, are all the results of these upgrade costs.
However, we cannot blame the manufacturers. Electron is ubiquitous because it at least gives them a predictable target that helps solve the separation problem.
Is Microsoft doing anything about it?
Maybe
In January 2026, Microsoft announced the Windows App Development CLI (winapp), a new open command tool designed to simplify the development life of Windows applications across different architectures and devices. It helps with the current hardware problem, but not the basic partition. Here’s hoping that Microsoft’s promises to improve things like dropping Copilot and fixing RAM optimization will also help.
What does this mean for you?
If nothing else, knowing about Electron’s tools will help you figure out why your RAM usage is skyrocketing and starting up slow. Simply buying more RAM or getting a better battery won’t fix the cause, either.
Currently, you can select the types of device browsers for common use (Discord and Teams work well on the web), check which of your devices are based on Electron, and manage your background permissions. A real fix needs to include Microsoft’s commitment to a stable platform, even though the past three decades have shown it can’t do that.
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