Smannesman: It's bloated for what it does, which is basically nothing.
Time tracking and achievements are still buggy.
It's just a packaged shitty browser.
Galaxy uses Google Chromium Embedded Framework as the browser technology it is based upon. Steam, Origin and almost every other gaming client also uses CEF, and that is basically the embedded version of the Google Chrome browser engine.
People can call these applications bloated if they wish, however when designing something like a gaming client with a list of features like modern gaming clients have, there are basically two ways to do it:
1) Reuse existing technology, especially if it is open source or otherwise freely available or it is available cheaply enough.
2) Reinvent all of the technology yourself in-house and take 5 years longer to develop it all (or more).
A store that is wanting to put something modern out there to compete with the 800 pound gorillas in the industry, is not going to get very far unless they provide the types of features that people have come to expect from the big players in the industry. That means Steam, Origin, Uplay, Battle.NET.
That's not something that's developed over night of course, but they need to set their target and then consider what technological approach is the best suited to get there as soon as possible and flexibly. Starting with a small team and designing everything completely from the ground up is just not economically viable. To compete with Steam and the other big players by definition the client needs to provide a rich multimedia experience as it matures, and that includes using web technologies. It makes no sense to develop their own web render engine from scratch when there are several already available for free open source, namely Google CEF and Mozilla's gecko. Like almost every other company out there, as well as various open source clients as well - they chose to go with Google CEF as it is tried and true throughout the industry.
People might not like that and everyone is entitled to their opinion of course, but GOG is trying to run a growing business in a tooth and nail market with big boys all around them, so they have to step up to the plate and provide the types of services and features that the overall market wants to have, and that pretty much demands using something like CEF. If they chose to do it all themselves from scratch, it would have been 5 years before we ever even heard the name "Galaxy" I believe. They've got a very small team and simply do not have the manpower to develop a rich powerhouse gaming client and make it run in 1MB of RAM like 0.00001% of the highly vocal user base would like to have.
They're going to target it toward the overwhelming majority of their millions of customers out there based on the hardware they have, and in addition to their own statistical gathering and market research, they have access to Steam hardware survey which shows the breakdown of CPU/GPU/RAM/disk space/resolution etc. that is most common all the way to least common. Like any software development house they're going to target their software to the largest part of the market that gives the biggest bang for the buck. I'd wager that 95-98% or more of GOG's customers have computers that are far more than adequate to run Galaxy as-is, Steam, Origin or any other client. They all average out to using 250-500MB of RAM depending on what all pages have loaded etc. They're not going to target 100% of their customers with Galaxy because there are always stragglers that will never upgrade until their computer catches on fire, and once you get to a certain point, say 95% of the market, the resources it takes in manpower to support the other 5% is probably double or triple what it takes to support the 95%. I'm making these numbers up as hypothetical examples because we don't know the exact numbers, but they can just as easily juggle to the left or right to match reality and the overall point is the same, which is that developmentally they reach a point of diminishing returns to try to develop something that works for everyone and makes everyone happy. Worse than that, is that what the people want en-masse who have a modern system bought in the last 5 years or so are mutually at odds with what the people want who have systems that Galaxy wont run on because "it is bloated".
And as for that "bloat", keep in mind the overwhelming amount of memory usage is from graphic images decompressed into a usable form for display and other rich media. This is true for web browsers also. Some might call this bloat, but I call it "technology advances, and our needs and desires advance with it to use that for something beneficial". "Bloat" is one of those meaningless words people throw around these days when they just simply don't like something - it's more or less lost its actual meaning long ago IMHO.
Of course people are free to be bummed out or even upset about Galaxy not meeting their needs if they do actually in fact want a gaming client and they can't run it because they're using a Pentium Pro with 128MB of RAM or whatnot, but the frameworks GOG chose to use are completely realistic and viable and any sensible company out there would have done the same thing - mostly because - every other sensible company out there already did the same thing, or something equivalent.
People with extremely low resource systems likely shouldn't (and probably couldn't) run Galaxy/Steam etc. anyway, but they should at least understand that there are rock solid valid reasons why it is implemented using the tech it uses in order to be market viable, otherwise they'd have completely wasted their time making a gaming client that runs on everything from Windows 10 all the way back to Windows 95 just to appease 0.1% or less of the userbase (numbers pulled outta my arse hehe). :P
In balance I'd say that if they've failed anywhere, they've failed in their timeliness of getting new features to market, and of stabilizing the Galaxy protocols and publicly documenting them as they claimed they would do eventually. Even though they never promised or committed to any dates or timelines for these things, many people did expect a lot of things to happen sooner than now and they haven't. If they were to stabilize the Galaxy APIs to something they feel they will commit to and document it and stick it out there openly for public access like Steam does, then there would probably be a dozen lightweight game library management clients out there for it already minus the store, that probably would do away with all the web related bits and not need to use any embedded web framework.
I'm sure that'll happen some time if GOG sticks to their promise of documenting the Galaxy APIs publicly for 3rd party clients etc. but I think that like many developers (myself included!), their visions of what they wanted Galaxy to be and all of the brainstorming of features/functionality etc. that they had are probably taking longer than they likely expected it would. That is a guess on my part as I don't believe they've ever publicly said anything to that effect.
The odd friendly discourse on such matters as we are doing right now however hopefully give them a few friendly kicks in the behind to throw some more hamsters into the hamster wheel and step on the bellows a few times. :)
