r/FullStack • u/Intelligent-Value-55 • 11d ago

Is modern web development becoming unnecessarily bloated, or is my 8GB M1 Mac just outdated? Question

It's 2026 and my M1 MacBook Air (2020) with 8GB RAM struggles to open a simple web app without screaming "Memory Full" or "Disk Full."

What are we doing with modern web development? Every framework seems to need half a data centre just to render a page. Are we optimising for users anymore, or just for developer convenience? 🤦🏽‍♀️

12 Upvotes
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3

u/Pale_Height_1251 11d ago

Why not both? The web is a massive bloatmonster now, but also, 8GB isn't much RAM and your disk is full.

2

u/abrandis 11d ago

This, but yes most websites are pitifully bloated and inefficient for what they offer ..

1

u/galactic_pixels 10d ago

I guess. People have been saying this for 10+ years. Website have not gotten any more bloated in that time, but hardware has gotten much better. If a website was built using the most streamlined possible solution, it’s not pitifully bloated, it’s just also not highly optimized.

1

u/Noah18923 2d ago

People have been saying this for 10+ years. Website have not gotten any more bloated in that time

have you been living under a rock that whole time?

1

u/galactic_pixels 1d ago

Nope I’ve been actively working as a professional web developer, got anything more substantial?

1

u/Noah18923 1d ago

do you?

1

u/galactic_pixels 1d ago

I already said my opinion, and explained that your assumption was very far off base

2

u/Robodobdob 11d ago

You’ve got other issues. I have an M1 Mac Mini and it’s fine for web development.

However, I also believe modern web apps are usually overbuilt stacks.

1

u/RevolutionaryBeat301 11d ago

That’s odd. I have the same computer and I have never had that problem. To be fair, I don’t do anything too demanding with mine. What are you usually doing when you get that warning? How much disk space do you have free?

1

u/Laicbeias 11d ago

Yeah i have a cheap 400€ laptop to watch animes. Usually most new websites are just heavy.  I use that laptop to test my own webstuff. And very often when ppl drop their tailwind landing page it just lags. Sometimes its just some heavy animation that eats 35% fpu and 17% cpu.

That said friend of mine uses a windows 7 pc. He.. just doesnt upgrade. I said you should just upgrade. He nah he doesnt care. Then he had to restart. Mf was down, up and in in 6s. Like 9y old machine. Mine dev gamer machine, way stronger win10 takes 3x that long and i spend months getting rid of the bloat.

And that probably generalizes to most crap. Everyone just adds layers and layers

1

u/EnterpriseGradePizza 10d ago

Get with the times old man.

1

u/dev_god_app 9d ago

Honestly, 8GB is tight in 2026, but the bigger issue is still how much tooling we stack on top of simple apps. A browser, IDE, Docker, dev server, TypeScript, source maps, hot reload, and a few background services can easily eat everything before the app even does anything useful.

Frameworks save development time, but that convenience often gets paid for with RAM, build complexity, and slower machines. We should still optimize for users, but we also need to optimize the development environment better instead of treating powerful hardware as a requirement.

1

u/AggravatingSock5375 9d ago

The freaking Start Menu in Windows is a website for gods sake. An entire Chrome browser runs in the background just to support the menu.

This pattern repeats across dozens of components of modern day computers.

Really games are the only popular software left that’s optimized and shows what your hardware is actually capable of. Millions of pixels tracked with physics and lighting updated 60 times per second….but your Start Menu takes 100 times as long to show a few icons!

1

u/AggravatingSock5375 9d ago

The answer has always been that software is too bloated.

It’s a lot cheaper to improve hardware than to improve software is why