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Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

josephg.com

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Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#151

Post by Cthulhu_ »

bmpafa wrote: post #141
matthewmacleod wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nonsense . Desktop apps have been frequently released since forever. The underlying issue here is that Electron reduces the barrier to entry for cross-platform development . That is, it's cheaper to build a single cross-platform application in Electron than it is to build two or three native applications, and you can re-use your existing web experience. I can completely understand why companies might choose th…

Bingo--half these diatribes against Electron just seem to be making the case for premature optimization.

Spotify, Slack and Atom are no longer hip startups though - they're established applications, and at least two of them have a very lucrative monthly subscription model. They can afford to optimize.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#152

Post by josephg »

Udo wrote: post #38

It's appropriate to call Chrome an OS-like platform, and it's quite convenient to ship apps with, but it's not "Flash for the desktop". As someone who is opposed to bloat but sometimes appreciates convenience, I think Electron is getting a bad rap here for something that was screwed up by the JS app developers. Go to Electron's website and download the demo (called API Demos). It's 3 processes and consumes 0.0 CPU on…

Blog author here. Thats a fair criticism. I wanted to pick on Spotify and Atom more in my blog post, but both Spotify and Atom have cleaned up their act. I couldn't get either one to reproducibly use lots of CPU. Props to everyone involved in fixing that.

But I'd also argue that Flash could always be written to be efficient too. The problem with flash was never the little games people made. The problem was that one tab with a stupid punch-the-monkey banner add playing somewhere that would sit on 20% cpu even when the tab was in the background. I think Electron is similar, except in the desktop space. Well written apps seem to be able to keep CPU load down (although they still have a huge download and a huge RAM footprint). But there's been a running trend of noticing some dumb software running somewhere on my machine eating all my CPU. And in the last year or two its been an electron app, every time. Just like flash before it.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#153

Post by cookiecaper »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #29
paraboul wrote: post #14

FWIW, we're working on https://github.com/nidium/Nidium presicely to fix this. A new kind of browser engine, not based on any existing engine, allowing developers to use a subset of the web (webgl, 2d, layout) without being forced to use a bloated ecosystem (and which also works on mobile and low end device). Previous HN discussion : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6314961

> To build nidium you need at least 5.7GB of disk space. A build from scratch may take 30 to 90 minutes, depending of the speed of your computer. Is this abnormally large for a project like this?

Just for comparison: I can build WINE from scratch in 6 minutes on my laptop (10 years ago, it took 20 minutes).

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#154

Post by zeveb »

Andrex wrote: post #47

> I just ... don't care about your app enough to justify running more chrome instances Is the author going to uninstall Slack, Atom, Chrome, and Spotify, then? Electron has won out because key apps have opted to use it and decided that the trade-offs of user CPU and battery are worth some amount less than their productivity as developers. Yes, there are alternatives to developing native desktop apps in JavaScript (I'…

> Is the author going to uninstall Slack, Atom, Chrome, and Spotify, then?

I read Slack in emacs. I write code in emacs. I browse the web in emacs & Firefox. I play music via my phone's native Google Play Music client, although if I wanted to I could use emms, an emacs music-playing mode.

I have no desire to run some GUI-only, CPU-hungry, memory-ravenous, of-the-moment JavaScript nightmare of a program. My productivity as a developer is hindered by those things. I have no desire to write JavaScript: I'd rather write Lisp, or Go, or Python.

Yes, it's possible — and preferable! — to uninstall Slack, Atom, Chrome and Spotify. Try it today.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#155

Post by foldr »

nonsince wrote: post #60
fknop wrote: post #25

Meanwhile, we're still waiting for those "pro-native" people to give us better user experience. I agree that Electron has its issue like having multiple copies of Chromium (and not Google Chrome). Obviously native apps are better overall, but only if they provide a better UX. Being a vscode user, I don't know which native editor provides the same UX.

Emacs provides a better UX, Visual Studio (proper) provides a better UX, Sublime provides something close, although not as good. Slack's UX is incredibly basic. It's a couple of steps above a basic CRUD app. There are billions of IRC and XMPP clients ranging from toy to professional-quality, I use IRSSI, which is admittedly basic, but I find it hard to believe that there is no better native chat UX in existence than…

>Emacs provides a better UX

VSCode is clearly aimed at people who disagree with this statement. It's hardly a matter of objective fact.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#156

Post by kenferry »

anaisbetts wrote: post #74

Here's the thing. You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet, the answer is, "It wouldn't exist at all". Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it, and it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x…

> it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x the cost), and also in finding specialist developers who know these dated technologies

What are you basing this on? There are plenty of iOS developers, and developing for Mac vs iOS is more similar than pretty much any two other dev platforms you can name.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#157

Post by cozzyd »

joshstrange wrote: post #112
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing I find ionic about this whole article is that it's perfectly easy to only use Slack within Chrome as a normal web app. And the UI is almost exactly the same because it's nearly all the same code. So if the Electron bloat is such as issue for you, just hit Slack in the web directly.

s/ionic/ironic But I find it to be a humorous typo given the topic of this discussion as ionic is a browser-based cross-platform mobile framework.

Indeed, we should start calling electron-less applications ionic.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#158

Post by rimliu »

joshstrange wrote: post #106
anaisbetts wrote: post #74

Here's the thing. You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet, the answer is, "It wouldn't exist at all". Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it, and it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x…

Completely agree. I simply have no interest in learning any native desktop programming and if I did it would be for my platform only and I wouldn't waste my time writing it for linux and definitely not for windows. I'd release what I had on github and move on. Now I can throw together a small (small by custom code sizes, I know electron is heavy) amount of code and get a cross platform app that doesn't look terrible…

   > I simply have no interest in learning any native
   > […] programming
And it is amazing to see how many bad reinventions of the wheel happens because of this. People claiming that writing electron app is 10x faster than native have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. The only think web-based tech will give you is ability to push out raw cross-platform prototype. Now try to polish that to the acceptable quality across the platforms and the many wins start to turn into loses.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#159

Post by sametmax »

wickedlogic wrote: post #146
Veen wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you call "trade-offs" appears to me to be developers externalizing their costs onto users. There are costs to developing desktop applications and developers don't want to pay them, so they make users pay for them in wasted hardware dollars, bandwidth, RAM, battery life, and poor integration.

Yes. You just described modern computing.

Computing for ever. We use C to avoid writing assembly. Use Java to avoid writing C. Use Python to avoid writing Java.

The world is asking for more and more software, and the resources to provide it are not following so people are taking shortcuts.

Want something better ? Someone has to pay for it.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#160

Post by Cthulhu_ »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #97
anaisbetts wrote: post #74

Here's the thing. You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet, the answer is, "It wouldn't exist at all". Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it, and it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x…

That's nonsense . Desktop apps have been frequently released since forever. The underlying issue here is that Electron reduces the barrier to entry for cross-platform development . That is, it's cheaper to build a single cross-platform application in Electron than it is to build two or three native applications, and you can re-use your existing web experience. I can completely understand why companies might choose th…

The main challenge, I think is that all of those apps are cross-platform, but also want to keep the same look and feel on all platforms - they're using their own UX patterns inside the container which generally don't match up with their host OSes.

There are some applications that do try so - 1password, GitHub for Mac/Windows to name a few that come to mind - but they seem to get less love than the cross-platform webapps. It feels like they get a certain amount of dev time before going to minimal maintenance mode.

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