That’s it, I’m calling it: Google’s apps are no longer “web apps” in any meaningful sense.

A web app by definition works in any modern web browser. Google Docs no longer does that. If I have to have Chrome open to use Google Docs, how is that different from running the Microsoft Word (or Apple Pages) fat client directly?

In fact it’s probably more RAM-efficient. Each of my Google Docs tabs is consuming just shy of 1.5 GB of RAM.

I’ll just repeat that to let it sink in: ONE AND A HALF GIGABYTES of memory to load a single document.

A bloated horse

Meanwhile, Microsoft Word, that paragon of lightweight agility, weighs in at less than 350 MB of RAM per document.

So that’s the practical aspect. Then there is the philosophical aspect. I run Safari rather than Chrome because it still behaves like a web browser, not a runtime for apps, which is what Google appears to think Chrome should be. A web app can run wherever any (reasonably modern) web browser can run; it doesn’t require a particular rendering engine to be supported on the hardware. Already on iPad, I need the apps for Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, because the web versions simply don’t work. That is not how the Web is supposed to work.

I almost wish Google would just go ahead and ship Google Docs as an Electron app on MacOS, since that’s functionally where we are anyway. Bundling the rendering engine directly with the app that way would at least be more honest.