I&#x27;ve been spending a lot of time in the embedded area lately (sub-200Mhz 32k RAM automotive systems, firmware and fpgas) and I agree with you. But there&#x27;s always tradeoffs. In this case you&#x27;re trading some memory (which is cheap nowadays) for up-to-date, secure, usable apps, which seems to be a pretty complex thing to do. Nobody solved it so far. The people using node-webkit are offloading the library compatibility issues to the people who built Chromium and are provided with a consistent container to run their application in.