Seven apps, seven copies of the same browser engine: 1.7 GB

Slack, Discord, VS Code, Notion, Postman and most AI coding apps are web apps in a native wrapper. The wrapper is Electron, and every app that uses it ships a complete copy of the browser engine inside its own bundle.

What was installed

The engines are not shared, and they cannot be. Each app is tested against the exact version it ships, and they are rarely the same version. So there is nothing to deduplicate by hand.

Find yours

for a in /Applications/*.app; do
  f="$a/Contents/Frameworks/Electron Framework.framework"
  [ -d "$f" ] && printf '%6s  %s\n' "$(du -sh "$f" | cut -f1)" "$(basename "$a")"
done

The bigger cost is outside the app

The framework is only the part you can see in /Applications. Each Electron app also keeps a browser profile in Application Support: web storage, a disk cache, a code cache, logs and crash dumps. On this Mac the Devin app held 1.12 GB in /Applications and another 3.01 GB in ~/Library/Application Support/Devin. That second number is the one worth chasing, and the Electron cache guide covers which parts of it are safe to clear.

What to do about it

• Use the web version for apps you open weekly. Slack, Notion, Figma and Postman all work in the browser you already have, which costs nothing extra.
• Remove the apps you tried once. An Electron app is rarely less than 300 MB once installed and run.
• Clear the caches, not the app. Cache folders come back smaller than the profile they sit in, and the app keeps working. Slack is the worked example.