361–370 of 438 posts
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Electron should be banned for the environments sake if the other reasons doesn't persuade, it's inefficient computation to energy ratio using Electron apps, when there is a lot of users like with VSCode or Slack it probably affects the global climate in a negative way
Let's ban anything not written in assembly.
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I run three browsers on my desktop, because the number of things that don't work properly in anything except recent Chrome is enough that I keep encountering issues, I don't want to use Chrome for my regular browsing, and both Safari and Firefox have issues on some sites. On my tablet, a number of current websites don't run even on Chrome, because the tablet isn't particularly new, so it doesn't have current Chrome.…
One major benefit of running webapps in an actual browser like Firefox, instead of Electron, is that I can have uBlock and a handful of other defensive plugins, to prevent shady things happening behind my back.
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Slack originally was platform specific webviews, and migrated to avoid issues like what is mentioned in this thread. One of the engineers who did it has even commented on HN to explain this.
This is probably the comment you're talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18763449 . I was unconvinced then, and I am even more unconvinced now as I run a fully native Cocoa Slack client on my Mac that was written by one person reverse engineering APIs.
You and I both know that one person can write UI in a vacuum, but there's a litany of other challenges that come up when positioning an application across platforms - sharing code, resources, etc. If all you look at it on is a technical level, you're doing the problem a disservice.
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We use the WebView approach for Kreya[1], though not with Tauri. We had some occassional issues with Chromium/Safari differences, but otherwise it works fine. We use WebView2 on Windows, Safari on macOS and WebKit2GTK on Linux. Not shipping a whole Chromium installation on each install and update reduces the installer and on-disk size a lot! [1] https://kreya.app
https://kreya.app/docs/getting-started I see issues here! > Apple Silicon (M1) is not yet supported. And on Linux, > you may install Kreya by downloading the tarball. Note that both libgtk-3 and libwebkit2gtk-4.0 dependencies are required. Install them manually if they aren't present on your system. libwebkit2gtk is, itself, _an embedded browser_, 44MB installed size, plus dependencies. It's convenient that you can m…
Linux does not have a core WebView out of the box, so libwebkit2gtk is the closest alternative. Not optimal, but it works. Looks like Tauri uses libwebkit2gtk too.
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> Electron gives the promise of total code re-use across platforms which is what makes web technologies more suitable for desktop apps. I am not sure what the point is of Electron: a shitty-resource hungry app that literally is a wrapped web-app. Instead of writing platform specific apps that leverage the power and capabilities of those platforms, we get a jack of all trades and master of none. Electron is a business…
Electron should be banned for the environments sake if the other reasons doesn't persuade, it's inefficient computation to energy ratio using Electron apps, when there is a lot of users like with VSCode or Slack it probably affects the global climate in a negative way
Probably true.
> affects the global climate in a negative way
If electricity consumption of all computers in the world doubled because of Electron apps, the total annual electricity consumption would increase by 0.01%. So probably false.
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People have been trying the WebView approach for years. (Projects include: Quark, Electrino, DeskGap, Revery, and Neutralino.) Historically, it worked terribly on Windows. On Windows, if you used the OS WebView, your Windows 7 users would be forced to use IE11 to run your app, even if they had a newer/better browser installed locally. On Windows 10, you'd get whatever random version of Edge was installed, or the new…
Fortunately MacOS users upgrade very quickly. High Serria which is slowly waning at 7% came out in 2017. Compared to windows where twice as many (16%) at still using Windows 7 and won't be able to download the Webview2 update which Microsoft kindly provides. https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk... https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/macos/des... Really depends on your market I g…
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In 2008, when IE7 came out, I cried of joy. I turned 22 that year, so the 7 years with only IE6 and Firefox was a significant chunk of my life. Firefox showed us that the web wasn't finished and could still be improved, and then came Firebug which made Firefox first web dev the obvious choice. But the vast majority still used IE6, so there was always a miserable step in the project of fixing all the IE bugs. After do…
I've had to say this a fair few times here, but I'll keep saying it. IEDevToolbar, which Firebug was pretty much a clone of, came out a year before Firebug. And it took Firebug years to catch up in feature parity, as far as I remember. So, firebug didn't make it the dev tool of choice. We all just hated microsoft. And tabbed browsing was great.
I used that IE toolbar setup for years, and it _never_ worked as well as Firebug did.
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Yes, but it is not installed by default. You have to install it separately, at least for now,which makes things a lot more complicated if you want your app to rely on it.
I'm moderately certain that Chromium is installed by default on new installs of Windows now.
It's slightly absurd, and you should direct the "WTF?" to Microsoft for this.
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> Electron gives the promise of total code re-use across platforms which is what makes web technologies more suitable for desktop apps. I am not sure what the point is of Electron: a shitty-resource hungry app that literally is a wrapped web-app. Instead of writing platform specific apps that leverage the power and capabilities of those platforms, we get a jack of all trades and master of none. Electron is a business…
> Instead of writing platform specific apps You've answered your own question as to why people write then. > What value does electron add to the user? It adds a lot of value to Linux and to a lesser extent Mac users: before a electron a lot of apps didn't have a version for these platform at all.
This kind of makes me think... is there room for a much more stripped down version of Chromium that is suitable for lower memory footprint? Or is this impossible? It looks like Tauri uses system webviews, which use a lot less memory, but the burden is then on the developer to make sure that they build essentially 3 (maybe more) UI's on platforms that might change under their feet. That's why the Electron approach is…
"is this impossible?" Possible, see Sciter.JS : https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk 10 times more compact than Tauri, 20 times less than Electron.JS Yet it has Rust API ( https://github.com/sciter-sdk/rust-sciter ), that if someone need "Made with Rust" label :) And it works even on Windows 2000, do you remember that thing? See: https://sciter.com/necromancing-sciter-on-windows-2000/