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Electron 7.0

electronjs.org

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Re: Electron 7.0

#91

Post by mshroyer »

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,…

> But Electron has brought true cross-platform development to all platforms (Including Linux!).

Only if we restrict "all platforms" to mean Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Building and porting Electron appears to be a horrific experience [1], which limits its cross-platform utility. It's only recently that someone pulled the heroics of getting Electron 4 (!) into FreeBSD ports; I still can't run VS Code on OpenBSD.

Meanwhile I've yet to encounter an OS with an X11 display where I can't run a Qt app. So I certainly wouldn't hold Electron up as a paragon of cross-platform support.

[1] https://deftly.net/posts/2017-06-01-measuring-the-weight-of-...

Re: Electron 7.0

#92

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

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…

Microsoft has made it pretty clear since about Windows 10 that they don't actually care about the Desktop anymore. It certainly isn't anywhere near their biggest money-maker.

Re: Electron 7.0

#93

Post by dewey »

rolleiflex wrote: post #77
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 release two apps, across 3 OSes, in somewhat of a bimonthly cadence with a low defect rate. That’s 6 different binaries. I’m a solo founder. I know people like to rag on Electron, but without it, I wouldn’t be using something else, my apps just wouldn’t exist . It allows more people to try building more thing and that is a net positive. The speed problems and bloat issues of Electron is just shoddy programming on t…

For me, and probably others, the main issue with Electron isn't the speed or even resource usage. It's that it ignores common UX/UI conventions you expect from a native app which still makes me prefer native macOS apps.

Re: Electron 7.0

#94

Post by brianzelip »

marshallofsound wrote: post #47
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.…

Disclaimer: Electron dev So few quick things, the projects that are copied are done so to guarantee deterministic builds in an isolated build environment (no dependencies on third party systems). The API you say they don't provide is literally the API that Electron uses. --> https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/conten... And as for the build process, eh, it's kinda slow but it's hardly arcane. On lin…

Hey thanks for you and your team's hard work. I absolutely love the empowerment that electron provides.

Re: Electron 7.0

#95

Post by windsurfer »

vips7L wrote: post #72
windsurfer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Slack is currently only using 90MB on my machine...

Are you sure you are looking at all running processes? Slack splits it's memory usage across multiple, as you can see from my screenshot.

Re: Electron 7.0

#96

Post by inferiorhuman »

rolleiflex wrote: post #77
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 release two apps, across 3 OSes, in somewhat of a bimonthly cadence with a low defect rate. That’s 6 different binaries. I’m a solo founder. I know people like to rag on Electron, but without it, I wouldn’t be using something else, my apps just wouldn’t exist . It allows more people to try building more thing and that is a net positive. The speed problems and bloat issues of Electron is just shoddy programming on t…

I know people like to rag on Electron, but without it, I wouldn’t be using something else, my apps just wouldn’t exist.

Cool. With Electron your app will only work on Linux/Windows/MacOS. There are other cross-platform solutions.

Re: Electron 7.0

#97

Post by vips7L »

windsurfer wrote: post #95
vips7L wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack is currently only using 90MB on my machine...

Are you sure you are looking at all running processes? Slack splits it's memory usage across multiple, as you can see from my screenshot.

Windows groups them so yes.

Re: Electron 7.0

#98

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

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

If a developer has already decided they care about resource consumption and bloat so little that they're distributing on Electron, then why would you expect them to care about resource efficiency at all?

Re: Electron 7.0

#99

Post by rolleiflex »

dewey wrote: post #93
rolleiflex wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I release two apps, across 3 OSes, in somewhat of a bimonthly cadence with a low defect rate. That’s 6 different binaries. I’m a solo founder. I know people like to rag on Electron, but without it, I wouldn’t be using something else, my apps just wouldn’t exist . It allows more people to try building more thing and that is a net positive. The speed problems and bloat issues of Electron is just shoddy programming on t…

For me, and probably others, the main issue with Electron isn't the speed or even resource usage. It's that it ignores common UX/UI conventions you expect from a native app which still makes me prefer native macOS apps.

I agree with this. Unfortunately that’s a designer bottleneck rather than anything else. Think of it this way, if somebody ends up with a mess of an Electron app, he or she probably wouldn’t have fared any better in usability with a native app even if the UI would look superficially ‘in-spec’.

Edit: Also as an example, Aether comes with plenty of shortcuts, or even has proper tabbing and tab highlighting for low-vision users. Electron prevents none of these, in fact the platform it’s based on, the DOM, is one of the most accessible platforms ever made in terms of support. Whether people actually make use of it it is another matter.

Re: Electron 7.0

#100

Post by CDSlice »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #96
rolleiflex wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I release two apps, across 3 OSes, in somewhat of a bimonthly cadence with a low defect rate. That’s 6 different binaries. I’m a solo founder. I know people like to rag on Electron, but without it, I wouldn’t be using something else, my apps just wouldn’t exist . It allows more people to try building more thing and that is a net positive. The speed problems and bloat issues of Electron is just shoddy programming on t…

I know people like to rag on Electron, but without it, I wouldn’t be using something else, my apps just wouldn’t exist. Cool. With Electron your app will only work on Linux/Windows/MacOS. There are other cross-platform solutions.

What other PC OSs are there that actually gets used? BSDs?
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