Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Electron 7.0

electronjs.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 289 posts

Re: Electron 7.0

#151

Post by m_fayer »

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 think this peaked some time around 2015. Back then, I remember many developers getting up in arms about following Apple's guidelines to a T, or insisting that Android apps look like a hyperactive stack of colorful paper cutouts under a direct light.

Since then, I think many of us have gotten tired of looking at overdesigned sameness that by now we all know will age quickly. Programmers no longer see the sense in chasing a perpetually changing visual standard for no reason other than "BigCo said so". Most importantly though, BigCos in question have fallen out of our good graces, and the "Design Systems" they keep pushing are now regarded as nothing but cynical branding exercises that come at the cost of UX.

Re: Electron 7.0

#152

Post by sroussey »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #85
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,…

Electron is so heavy you could include a copy of Windows 95 with every application and use its GUI. This is how ludicrous the state of modern computing is. Java accomplished the same thing with fewer limitations and vastly more efficiency. Best case scenario of the continuing "evolution" of electron is the elimination of the OS entirely. Why do you need it? Just put drivers in Chrome and be done with it. It's already…

In a later version of Electron (for Windows 10), it could use the Windows supplied Chromium WebView and shrink the size by 80%+.

Re: Electron 7.0

#153

Post by MisterTea »

sircastor wrote: post #88
alkonaut wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only each OS would ship an abstraction layer that guaranteed "at least modern browser X" that one could ship into. I want to ship an electron app but I want it to be 100kb and start in 0.1s and take almost no memory because the libs are shared. I don't want each little chat app or music player to gobble up half a gig of ram and take 3 seconds to start.

I think OS makers explicitly don't want to do this. In the case of Apple, they prefer you to use all their tools and technologies. It allows them more management of the experience.

Using the word experience is why we're in this mess. These are tools we're talking about. Not an African safari.

Re: Electron 7.0

#154

Post by sroussey »

pritambaral wrote: post #114
rosybox wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can use Qt with closed source software, under the LGPL license that you don't have to pay for. Only the binaries that have Qt code need to be open. Don't statically link Qt libs into your closed-source code and you're good.

And put that in an app store?

Re: Electron 7.0

#155

Post by _bxg1 »

johnisgood wrote: post #130
_bxg1 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sometimes web developers will circumvent core HTML features because they don't do everything they want and aren't extensible enough, although this is generally considered bad practice if it's at all avoidable. Sometimes they just don't bother to write semantic HTML even when they could. But the platform itself has the infrastructure; it's possible to write bad software on any platform.

Re: Electron 7.0

#156

Post by snek »

choeger wrote: post #53
marshallofsound wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah. Four commands. The first one downloads binaries from the internet. If I was inclined to do so, I would not need to build in the first place ;). Give it a try with the current HEAD of their home-grown and undocumented build tool and see how far you get. And regarding the deterministic builds: I call bullshit. They just don't want to follow the different packaging guidelines from the different operating systems,…

> [build process]

I agree, the chromium build tooling is unfriendly af.

> I call bullshit

Lot of works goes into deterministic builds, have fun going down this rabbit hole: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=314403

> Now I have to trust them to keep all these dependencies up-to-date

Looks like it rolls on average every 10-20 minutes: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+log/HEAD/DEP...

> and I have to accept the unecessary bloat?

Ah yes, because all operating systems ship with a pristine installation of the latest pdfium.

Re: Electron 7.0

#157

Post by cweagans »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #147
nindalf wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm perfectly happy supporting 99.99% of desktop users out there using Linux/Windows/MacOS. Users of BSD, Haiku, Redox and TempleOS are sadly not numerous enough to support. It's the same reason any app developer nowadays only supports iOS and Android and not say, KaiOS (honestly, hands up if you've even heard of KaiOS). Don't rag on software teams for making trade-offs based on the resources they have.

Don't rag on software teams for making trade-offs based on the resources they have. It's not just that app devs aren't making non Linux/x86 apps, the problems are that those devs now cannot make non Linux apps. Period. In spite of this lack of portability they're now crowing about how portable and awesome their "cross-platform" app is. All of this to provide the consistently mediocre Electron experience.

Alternatively, you could roll up your sleeves and add support for whatever obscure OS you want to Electron and then have an entire world of apps available to you.

Mediocre and working > not existing

Re: Electron 7.0

#158

Post by zrobotics »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #137
rosybox wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 Are you really surviving on $5,500 annually?

$5.5k annually, even in the US, is still enough money to devote a few hours per week on a paid hobby project. I'm actually working on a side-project app right now, and if it makes >5.5k/year I'd be fairly pleased.

Not enough to survive on, but as a sideline business that isn't terrible money as long as it doesn't consume 40 hours/week.

Re: Electron 7.0

#159

Post by fsloth »

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.

Personally I'm fine with application specific UI schemes. It's a bit silly every application would follow the same guidelines as applications are intended to do different things. Platform UX/UI conventions place too strict limitations on innovation.

The original point - that people would get confused from non-platform UI schemes - has been proven kind of moot since most games have their own domain specific UI schemes and people love them anyway.

Re: Electron 7.0

#160

Post by nereye »

CDSlice wrote: post #131
inferiorhuman wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What other PC OSs are there that actually gets used? BSDs? Yes. Or Linux on non-x86 platforms.

Electron not supporting ARM or other non-x86 platforms is a big problem that I was not aware of. I wonder if that will change with Microsoft starting to make ARM laptops and Apple being rumored to switch to ARM sometime in the future.

From https://electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/support:

Linux The prebuilt ia32 (i686) and x64 (amd64) binaries of Electron are built on Ubuntu 12.04, the armv7l binary is built against ARM v7 with hard-float ABI and NEON for Debian Wheezy.

Post reply on HN