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Electron 7.0

electronjs.org

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Re: Electron 7.0

#61

Post by grumpy8 »

Razengan wrote: post #3

Since 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 don't know why that is, but in the end, aren't web browsers using the native os widgets for input text, etc.?

Re: Electron 7.0

#62

Post by bryanlarsen »

Razengan wrote: post #55
scrollaway wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insert any framework in place of SwiftUI. You're describing Qt, essentially. The approach has been tried, and succeeded to some degree. But the web is the only app where cross-platform is the default , and it's truly hard to avoid it. Even if the widgets all look different. Even if nothing looks native (people got used to it anyway). And to be clear I want the status quo to improve in this regard, especially in terms…

> Insert any framework in place of SwiftUI. You're describing Qt, essentially. SwiftUI's syntax feels closer to a markup language than code, though, so it might be more appealing to web frontend devs.

QT Quick also uses a markup language.

Re: Electron 7.0

#63

Post by tambourine_man »

scrollaway wrote: post #5

I'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,…

Besides memory consumption, the killer feature for me would be true native text boxes. Skype on the Mac won't expand my abbreviations, use my dictionaries, etc. Drives me nuts.

Maybe that's Skype's fault, it wouldn't surprise me, but I think I've seen this behavior elsewhere. Skype is, thankfully, the only Electron app I have to interact frequently.

Re: Electron 7.0

#65

Post by maxbrunsfeld »

windsurfer wrote: post #35
eicossa wrote: post #23

Wait ... let me see if I can anticipate the top comment "Electron consumes so many resources ... Why so resource hungry ... My workstation already runs Chrome, can't have electron apps bogging it down ... Slack runs on Electron ... VSCode is the only good Electron app ... Why are we doing this ... Dennis Ritchie would be turning in his grave" This topic could honestly trigger the "parse regex with html" kind of reply…

Well, Slack is currently taking almost 3 GB of memory on my machine. Not entirely sure if that's due to Electron or Slack, but I have never found an Electron app that didn't consume vast swathes of memory. https://imgur.com/GscRFD7.png

It is not because of Electron.

An empty Atom window containing 5 source code files consumes about 120MB of RAM. For comparison with native apps, an empty iTerm2 window uses 100MB, and so does an empty Notes.app window. The base memory footprint imposed by Chromium is not that significant.

Re: Electron 7.0

#66

Post by kick »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #62
Razengan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Insert any framework in place of SwiftUI. You're describing Qt, essentially. SwiftUI's syntax feels closer to a markup language than code, though, so it might be more appealing to web frontend devs.

QT Quick also uses a markup language.

Not a good or reasonable one, though. This is no slight against Qt devs, and I think they're fixing it in Qt6, but it's just not good.

Re: Electron 7.0

#67

Post by flowerlad »

scrollaway wrote: post #5

I'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,…

>> OSes and frameworks have tried to solve this a bazillion ways.

What is different today is that Windows 10 and other popular platforms adopted Flat UI. Users no longer expect apps to have “native look & feel” because Flat UI has no recognizable or desirable look & feel. This is a big mistake by Microsoft because there is no longer any reason for independent developers to write native Windows apps. This works to the benefit of Electron and also users of non-Windows platforms.

Re: Electron 7.0

#68

Post by The_rationalist »

choeger wrote: post #44

Hey, another electron thread. Wait a second, did someone already mention how horrible Javascript is? The memory consumption? The minimal integration into the OS/desktop (think accessibility)? Hmm ok, I need something new... Here it comes: chrome is inherently instable. The Google developers give a shit about their dependency management and have trillions of open source projects just literally copied into their trunk.…

Many of your critics are fallible but I will not spend time arguing, sadly. Yet,what do you think of TypeScript? It's a state of the art language feature wise (for it's rich type system)

Re: Electron 7.0

#69

Post by thrower123 »

scrollaway wrote: post #5

I'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 cannot love Electron. It's almost always an inappropriate choice for a desktop application, yet I see more and more of what should be power-user desktop applications moving towards using it, and it is horrible.

My largest gripe with it, besides the others that are discussed ad nauseum already, is that it is impossible, seemingly, for Electron apps to spawn multiple windows without creating entire new instances. I have several Electron-based chat applications that are a trainwreck to use, compared to their predecessors, because there is no effective way to handle more than one chat at a time; they can't just pop out a small dedicated window for a chat conversation, they have to live inside their one window, and this results in a terrible tabbed UI where one is constantly flipping back and forth between conversation threads. Or the bevy of Electron text editors that you cannot tear a file tab off and put on another screen.

Re: Electron 7.0

#70

Post by karmicthreat »

flowerlad wrote: post #67
scrollaway wrote: post #5

I'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,…

>> OSes and frameworks have tried to solve this a bazillion ways. What is different today is that Windows 10 and other popular platforms adopted Flat UI. Users no longer expect apps to have “native look & feel” because Flat UI has no recognizable or desirable look & feel. This is a big mistake by Microsoft because there is no longer any reason for independent developers to write native Windows apps. This works to the…

I don't think that is even a worry for microsoft. Its looking like MS is going to make blazor on electron and eventually blazor on native their cross platform UI.
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