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Ask HN: Is Electron really that bad for desktop apps?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Electron really that bad for desktop apps?

#21

Post by icc97 »

I think it depends who your audience is. Everyone I work with is more than happy to install the Slack electron app, but none of them read HN.

If your intended audience is a 'Show HN' expect to be damned for it. If your audience spans say Windows and Mac and are technical but perhaps less technical than HN readers it can be an easy way to extend your web app onto the desktop.

Also it might depend on whether your app needs to always run in the background or not. For example I use Pencil [0] for UX mockups, it doesn't bother me that it's an electron app because I only need it for a few days a month. However the persistent RAM use of Slack eventually annoyed me enough that I uninstalled it.

[0]: http://pencil.evolus.vn/

Re: Ask HN: Is Electron really that bad for desktop apps?

#22

Post by SahAssar »

rococode wrote: post #3

I think it's important to consider what your program is going to do. Discord, for example, uses Electron, and I'm perfectly happy with it (as are most of the millions of others who use it). It's a product with a lot of functionality and it makes sense for it to have slower startup times, higher distribution size, and more memory usage. But if you're planning to make a calculator, then Electron probably isn't the righ…

Discord, Slack and other chat apps are the perfect example of when not to use electron. They should just be webapps.

Re: Ask HN: Is Electron really that bad for desktop apps?

#23

Post by raquo »

SahAssar wrote: post #20
raspie wrote: post #17

Consider Chromium Embedded Framework, or Sciter. These too let you define your UI with JS/HTML/CSS, but you're not shipping a node.js server with your app, which makes your app much lighter.

In that case why not just make a webapp?

Because you can still have a "backend" hosted on the user's computer, it just doesn't have to be node.js, could be something more efficient or powerful or whatever is needed.

Re: Ask HN: Is Electron really that bad for desktop apps?

#24

Post by prepromorphism »

rococode wrote: post #3

I think it's important to consider what your program is going to do. Discord, for example, uses Electron, and I'm perfectly happy with it (as are most of the millions of others who use it). It's a product with a lot of functionality and it makes sense for it to have slower startup times, higher distribution size, and more memory usage. But if you're planning to make a calculator, then Electron probably isn't the righ…

I agree, that a good UI is a very important thing in desktop applications and elsewhere. But, to me replacing the border of a button with something "prettier" is usually a UI defect and not an improvement. Desktop environments gain a lot of intuitiveness and ease of use by being consistent. And every damned web designer developing desktop "apps" thinks he has to invent every convention of UIs new, just to be prettier. Usually they loose accessibility, the ability to be used by keyboard and or the ability to render with different color schemes and resolutions. And what do they gain? Pretty borders that serve no purpose and make the UI unfamiliar to everyone.

Re: Ask HN: Is Electron really that bad for desktop apps?

#25

Post by tuananh »

kbumsik wrote: post #13

Firtstly writing Qt desktop apps in Python is pretty popular so we don’t need to stick with C++ to write Qt app. It is hard to understand people cares about memory useage when desktops nowadays have a lot of RAM. What average Electron apps annoys me is their constant high CPU load. Some apps take ~10% of CPU load all the time. I think Electron itself is fine. Look at VS Code. It is fast even though it is written in E…

i'm fine with the ram usage. for me startup time is the bigger issue.

Re: Ask HN: Is Electron really that bad for desktop apps?

#26

Post by zerr »

raspie wrote: post #17

Consider Chromium Embedded Framework, or Sciter. These too let you define your UI with JS/HTML/CSS, but you're not shipping a node.js server with your app, which makes your app much lighter.

I believe it is Chromium that's the main bloat point in Electron, not the node.js.

Re: Ask HN: Is Electron really that bad for desktop apps?

#27

Post by isaiahg »

I've made desktop apps with electron and you can definitely make a decent one but it isn't going to be as fast. If it's a simple program it's not bad but if you're going to do any complicated computation you'll wish you had gone native. On the other hand, if it's not a complicated app, some people are going to wonder why this simple app is taking so many resources.

How about a compromise. Instead of c++ why not learn Python instead and use pyside QT. This was actually what I ended up doing coming from webdev. You don't get the steep learning curve and can get a lot of the benefits from native apps. It won't be as fast as C++ but you won't have the overhead of electron. And besides most apps probably aren't going to need to brute performance of C++.

Re: Ask HN: Is Electron really that bad for desktop apps?

#28

Post by bananicorn »

SahAssar wrote: post #22
rococode wrote: post #3

I think it's important to consider what your program is going to do. Discord, for example, uses Electron, and I'm perfectly happy with it (as are most of the millions of others who use it). It's a product with a lot of functionality and it makes sense for it to have slower startup times, higher distribution size, and more memory usage. But if you're planning to make a calculator, then Electron probably isn't the righ…

Discord, Slack and other chat apps are the perfect example of when not to use electron. They should just be webapps.

In fact, I think The Discord desktop client versus Ripcord[0] illustrates nicely how much better a native solution can run.

[0] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

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