Is there ongoing work to reduce the memory footprint of Electron apps? I'm genuinely curious.
Yes - WebAssembly. It would hopefully kill the whole thing as an end game.
Electron 7.0
11–20 of 289 posts
Re: Electron 7.0
#12Is there ongoing work to reduce the memory footprint of Electron apps? I'm genuinely curious.
If you mean individual Electron apps.. wouldn't this require reducing the memory footprint of Chromium, not Electron?
It seems many users hope to eventually see the ability to run multiple Electron apps on a single instance of Chromium.
Re: Electron 7.0
#13I'm bullish on Electron. I think it's just a couple of technical advancements away from being the ultimate desktop toolkit. For context, I love and have worked a ton with Qt, and I much prefer Qt UIs as a user. But Electron has brought true cross-platform development to all platforms (Including Linux!). If it weren't for Electron, I wouldn't even have a bunch of the apps I use today. Hell, I wouldn't have a good IDE,…
Agreed. We need a cross-OS definition of "web views" and a standard way to say, "use my default browser for all web views, including Electron".
Re: Electron 7.0
#14Is there ongoing work to reduce the memory footprint of Electron apps? I'm genuinely curious.
> Is there ongoing work to reduce the memory footprint of Electron apps? I'm genuinely curious.
Isn't Electron basically Chrome, so the ball be in Chrome's court on that?
That said, I really think that web development in general, including Electron needs a reboot. From my perspective as a user, everything seems to be full of bloat and memory leaks. Maybe some kind of redacted version of Javascript that's harder to screw up? If worse is better, lets at least try to refactor the worse crap we adopted to actually make it better.
Re: Electron 7.0
#15Every time Electron is mentioned I bust out the popcorn for the inevitable hate spewed towards it: "Javascript is a terrible language and no one should use it" "Separate instances of chrome for every app is dumb and consumes too much memory" "Qt is amazing and elegant and desktop-native. Why isn't everyone just using Qt?"
The people complaining are not the customers, they're the product. Electron isn't sold to the users running Slack and Spotify and Atom, it's sold to the developers of those things with the promise of a low-friction path for existing web devs to deploy a native-ish application on multiple platforms.
Re: Electron 7.0
#16Since this is inevitably going to generate some discussion over native apps vs. Electron (ah there's already a fellow comment about it), I'd like to point out an example that is important to me of why Electron is an inferior experience for users: In the GitHub Desktop client, which is an Electron app, I can't spell check my commit messages, something that every text field in every native macOS app gets for free.
Tangentially related, our customer care department can't spell check support responses in context, because the Zendesk platform seems to use a non-native widget. It is frustrating when web developers and frameworks break standard functionality that is built into browsers, like the back button.
Re: Electron 7.0
#17I'm bullish on Electron. I think it's just a couple of technical advancements away from being the ultimate desktop toolkit. For context, I love and have worked a ton with Qt, and I much prefer Qt UIs as a user. But Electron has brought true cross-platform development to all platforms (Including Linux!). If it weren't for Electron, I wouldn't even have a bunch of the apps I use today. Hell, I wouldn't have a good IDE,…
I'd rather see SwiftUI or something like it ported to other systems with a "driver" that translates it to each platform's 100% native UI.
It's already amazing in how it abstracts common elements for such distinct environments like desktop, phone, TV and watch while still exposing OS-specific features. Why not other operating systems?
Re: Electron 7.0
#18Every time Electron is mentioned I bust out the popcorn for the inevitable hate spewed towards it: "Javascript is a terrible language and no one should use it" "Separate instances of chrome for every app is dumb and consumes too much memory" "Qt is amazing and elegant and desktop-native. Why isn't everyone just using Qt?"
> "Separate instances of chrome for every app is dumb and consumes too much memory" That one is true though. Different Electron apps could at least share the runtime.
I imagine the different electron versions and different Chrome versions would make this hard without breaking things. Maybe a config option for "allow chromium between versions x and y" would solve this.
Re: Electron 7.0
#19Since this is inevitably going to generate some discussion over native apps vs. Electron (ah there's already a fellow comment about it), I'd like to point out an example that is important to me of why Electron is an inferior experience for users: In the GitHub Desktop client, which is an Electron app, I can't spell check my commit messages, something that every text field in every native macOS app gets for free.
I am curious: Does the Github Desktop client work with other git hosting platforms? From a quick look at its website, this appears to be left open.
Re: Electron 7.0
#20Is there ongoing work to reduce the memory footprint of Electron apps? I'm genuinely curious.
Yes - WebAssembly. It would hopefully kill the whole thing as an end game.
It really wouldn't. WebAssembly has nothing to do with the rendering engine, which is the bulk of Electron's footprint (and also the bulk of its apps' processing overhead). The latter can only be improved by Chromium devs (and is being improved constantly). The former requires that we come up with a way to share a single Chromium copy across apps. There's really no other way around it.