almost all the web apps out there are mobile friendly out there unless they are too much complicated in themselves
Web apps are better than no apps
11–20 of 199 posts
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#12Why deceptively package the javascript as an app when you can just put it on a website? And what's that about notes taking 120 Mb, when Electron apps start at 3-400 Mb? Deceptively split into and Not to mention when you leave a chat app like Discord or Slack running and they keep instatiating those meme gifs forever, until you run out of ram.
the website mechanism has so many flaws, an abitrary code size restriction for once, constant access to the internet for another. And you can't really tell if the code you run today is the same as that yesterday.
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#13Why deceptively package the javascript as an app when you can just put it on a website? And what's that about notes taking 120 Mb, when Electron apps start at 3-400 Mb? Deceptively split into and Not to mention when you leave a chat app like Discord or Slack running and they keep instatiating those meme gifs forever, until you run out of ram.
So you can later charge extra for the web version.
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#14I can feel the frustration when people are forced to use a specific proprietary app that is bad (hey MS Teams). They clearly have the resources and experience to build better native apps.
But I guess the one big advantage for electron is the Web stack. It is so ubiquitous and relevant that most developers have experience with it. In combination with open source, this is the reason VS Code (as an example) has so many contributions, leading to many features for a variety of languages and so many plugins. As a result, I don't have to learn other editors or IDEs which makes me more productive.
I would welcome performance improvements, but I heavily doubt that a native alternative for the same scope of VS Code can exist. Every other UI solution is niche compared to the Web. Even for mobile apps, many companies use something like React-native or Ionic instead of developing two native versions.
I hope that one day electron uses Bun[1] as it offers much more performance compared to node/v8. But until then, I will happily trade performance for productivity.
[1] https://bun.sh/
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#15"and JavaScrip is an interpreted language, not a compiled one, so by default, it will be orders of magnitude slower than an app written in Swift, Rust, or C++." This statement is misleading and false. The distinction between "interpreted" and "compiled" isn't as clear-cut as it once was, especially in the context of modern languages and runtimes. However, when it comes to JavaScript, here's the general understanding:…
There are benchmarks/cases were JS is faster then C++
Yes obliviously C++ is faster then JS, but complexity/time of programmer may cause you to write slower code then v8/JIT.
I can't sadly find a link for that benchmark
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#16> There are just too many levels, and JavaScrip is an interpreted language, not a compiled one, so by default, it will be orders of magnitude slower than an app written in Swift, Rust, or C++.
JavaScript isn't as fast as C++ or Rust, but it's pretty fast. Around the speed of Java and Go in some cases, which are compiled.
For a web app the speed of the language is rarely the bottleneck anyway, other than some exceptional cases like WebGL-type stuff.
What's also not mentioned is that because JavaScript is single-threaded and garbage collected, classes of issues that you'd see in C++ are completely avoided (of course at the cost of absolute performance potential). I'd argue that TypeScript is probably the easiest language to grok, but I'm biased.
Anyway, Electron is its own circle of hell as it redundantly ships a ton of stuff and eats memory due to its own inefficiencies (though some of this is necessary sadly as letting you Bring Your Own Browser would create complexity of its own). I'm honestly surprised the Chromium team hasn't already addressed this with the Electron team somehow by now, given the popularity of the apps.
Though, I guess with newer apis such as the File System one Electron is slowly becoming unnecessary (but I doubt it'll ever go away because it's doubtful Chrome will include all of the APIs necessary).
The other issues mentioned in the article, such as UI could easily be addressed if Google and Apple cared to. They could release a CSS framework and style guide and people would quickly adhere to it. Google kind of did this with Material, but it doesn't go far enough, which is why you see 3rd parties picking up the slack.
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#17> Such apps leverage the native platform’s interface, including windows, buttons, text areas, and everything else. They look right and familiar, and they behave this way. Nope, they don't look familiar because they look different on every platform. Give me consistency. If I buy a phone of some different brand (or use the family tablet which happens to be of a different brand), give me the same interface for each app…
> Nope, they don't look familiar because they look different on every platform. When I use an app, I don’t care what it looks like on somebody else’s phone, I care that it works the same as all the other apps on my phone. > Give me consistency. I want it to be consistent with all the other apps on my phone. I don’t care if it’s consistent with what’s running on somebody else’s phone.
They are saying if they have say an iphone and an android (tablet?), the same app should behave the same. Contrary to you, some people could not care less about "consistency" of different apps that have different UIs and do different things anyway.
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#18Why deceptively package the javascript as an app when you can just put it on a website? And what's that about notes taking 120 Mb, when Electron apps start at 3-400 Mb? Deceptively split into and Not to mention when you leave a chat app like Discord or Slack running and they keep instatiating those meme gifs forever, until you run out of ram.
the website mechanism has so many flaws, an abitrary code size restriction for once, constant access to the internet for another. And you can't really tell if the code you run today is the same as that yesterday.
Web apps don't require constant access to the internet.
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#19Why deceptively package the javascript as an app when you can just put it on a website? And what's that about notes taking 120 Mb, when Electron apps start at 3-400 Mb? Deceptively split into and Not to mention when you leave a chat app like Discord or Slack running and they keep instatiating those meme gifs forever, until you run out of ram.
> Why deceptively package the javascript as an app when you can just put it on a website?
In some cases, so you can load and save data from the user's disk instead of the app's back-end.
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#20> Such apps leverage the native platform’s interface, including windows, buttons, text areas, and everything else. They look right and familiar, and they behave this way. Nope, they don't look familiar because they look different on every platform. Give me consistency. If I buy a phone of some different brand (or use the family tablet which happens to be of a different brand), give me the same interface for each app…
To be fair a native iOS app will look the same on a new iPhone and same with android apps on a new android based phone.
iOS apps tend to have back buttons, vs Android's swipe from left side to go back