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Electron 7.0

electronjs.org

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Re: Electron 7.0

#121

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

Re: Electron 7.0

#122

Post by bitwize »

mshroyer wrote: post #91
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. Meanw…

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

"It's cross-platform! It works on Windows 95 and Windows NT!"

Re: Electron 7.0

#123

Post by davet91 »

rosybox wrote: post #83
headcanon wrote: post #2

Every 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 problem with Qt I have is how incredibly expensive it is. Sure it's free if you want to build something open source, but you know some of us have to also make money to pay for being alive and it's hard to bootstrap an application if you have to pay $5,508 up front, per developer, and then again on an annual basis.

The core of Qt is licensed under LGPL which means you can write and ship proprietary software with it. You just need to dynamically link and provide sources for the Qt libs if a user requests it.

Re: Electron 7.0

#124

Post by crispinb »

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.

That would have been me 18 months ago. But since dropping macOS I've become indifferent to platform conventions. I will never become hostage to a single platform again. Which (admittedly by a very different route) puts me more in touch with ordinary users, who for the most part don't care or notice.

Re: Electron 7.0

#125

Post by inferiorhuman »

bitwize wrote: post #118
inferiorhuman wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a solo founder, I doubt there are any other platforms that make economic sense to support, especially if it pulls effort away from the real money makers. Depending on the market, Linux wouldn't even make sense to support for most companies and it's only supported because Electron supports it out of the box. Well as a user I've already dismissed your app out of hand. Congrats.

If you have hungry mouths to feed, and whether or not they get fed depends on whether your app makes enough to justify the time and expense it takes to develop it, tell me you would have made a different decision. When development is your livelihood, you target the platforms that make money and only the platforms that make money. That pretty much means Windows and maybe Mac. Anything else is throwing money away.

tell me you would have made a different decision

Sure. As a developer I would've used Qt (or Gtk) because even on the platforms that Electron provides, both provide a much higher quality user experience. You may not care about Linux on non-x86 or QNX or BSDs now, but you've ruled out ever caring enough to consider them.

As a user I loathe Electron apps. They're slow, don't respect native mannerisms (e.g. VS Code for ages didn't put titles on windows you minimized), and horrifically bloated. I try not to use free Electron apps (Discord and Slack get used in a browser), and I would never pay for one. So there's that.

Re: Electron 7.0

#126

Post by [deleted] »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #111
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

I tend to get "helpers" that pile up that seem to consume the most. I developed an application with Electron (+ Vue + Node) for an internal tool used by non-technical staff at my work and I don't have nearly the consumption as some other applications, but there is a lot less occurring on the renderer process than it appears with other applications. I've added VSCode (with a large project), my application's usage (cen…

[deleted]

Re: Electron 7.0

#127

Post by hollerith »

mshroyer wrote: post #91
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. Meanw…

You might already know of this option, but if your interest in Electron is limited to running vscode on OpenBSD, there are many offerings, both proprietary and open-source, that offer "hosted" vscode where "hosted" means accessible over the net via an ordinary browser.

(One offering whose name escapes me has the restriction that it is impossible to develop a vscode extension using the offering.)

Re: Electron 7.0

#128

Post by boernard »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #119
bluesroo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a solo founder, I doubt there are any other platforms that make economic sense to support, especially if it pulls effort away from the real money makers. Depending on the market, Linux wouldn't even make sense to support for most companies and it's only supported because Electron supports it out of the box.

So really you only care about 2 operating systems, and you're willing to give up all the native integration opportunities on both of them for the minor convenience of only having to write one (bad, bloated, totally-out-of-place) GUI. Developers in the 90s often supported 5 or more different platforms. How is it that modern development is so much worse?

that 'minor' convenience is a quite huge one given that he stated that the other apps wouldn't exist if not for electron.

Re: Electron 7.0

#129

Post by _bxg1 »

Razengan wrote: post #38
_bxg1 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web text fields should also support that functionality, so it may be a question of GitHub breaking/disabling it in some way.

You're right; I just tested it in Discord, which does have a spell checker, and it seems to use the system dictionary (but it seems one way when teaching it new words), but it's still missing other global text field functionality: https://i.imgur.com/qpOU9dz.png The point remains: Electron apps generally lose many of the features that the host OS gives native apps for free.

But the native web, used properly, includes many of them itself. Things like accessibility, metadata, etc. You only really lose features if you're circumventing native web functionality.

Re: Electron 7.0

#130

Post by johnisgood »

_bxg1 wrote: post #129
Razengan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right; I just tested it in Discord, which does have a spell checker, and it seems to use the system dictionary (but it seems one way when teaching it new words), but it's still missing other global text field functionality: https://i.imgur.com/qpOU9dz.png The point remains: Electron apps generally lose many of the features that the host OS gives native apps for free.

But the native web, used properly, includes many of them itself. Things like accessibility, metadata, etc. You only really lose features if you're circumventing native web functionality.

The problem is that the developers of Electron apps explicitly disable those features. Why?
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