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Electron-based apps cause system-wide lag on macOS 26 Tahoe

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121–130 of 227 posts

Re: Electron-based apps cause system-wide lag on macOS 26 Tahoe

#121

Discord and VSCode work smoothly for me on an M4 MBP -- not sure if it's a compatibility difference or just performance hiding the problem, though. But Spotlight file search is completely broken, rebuilding the index doesn't help, and web results are the only thing it returns. After 20 years of intense research, Apple finally caught up to Microsoft in race to make search broken and useless.

It's very possible that the hardware performance is hiding the issue. I upgraded from my 2020 intel 13" mbp (16gb of ram, 4-core i5) to 16" M4 Pro for a variety of reasons, but the basic processes of MacOS were making it nearly inoperable periodically throughout the day. I gifted the old one to my gf, and I can hear the fans spin up from across the apartment when nothing else is happening but indexing. I recall regul…

I make a habit of turning off spotlight almost entirely. Search never returns what I want anyway, and the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

Go into preferences, spotlight and you can add folders to exclude from indexing. I add my home directory and most of the system directories and that more or less fixes the issue.

Re: Electron-based apps cause system-wide lag on macOS 26 Tahoe

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand what goes through the developer’s mind. A method is marked as private. It’s documented as not to be used by developers. Further documentation says that using it may break your application in strange ways now or in the future. Despite all this, the developer concludes: “yea, I think it’s a good idea to use this API!” Then, later when something breaks, it’s Shocked Pikachu all around.

> I don't understand Well. This is hardly the funniest example then. Check this one out: https://github.com/reactjs/react.dev/issues/3896

[deleted]

Re: Electron-based apps cause system-wide lag on macOS 26 Tahoe

#123
post #32
post #2

https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/48311#issuecomme... If this comment is to be believed, it's not Apple's fault. It's the apps mucking around with the internals of AppKit. This example just happens to illustrate two of my least favorite software engineering practices: (1) despite one piece of code making a method private, another piece of code still overrides it/modifies it/calls it, an affront to the idea…

Nah, it's Apple's fault. Not regression testing against major apps is pure incompetence. Also, this in the comment: > [a user] Please try any way of getting in touch with Apple engineers you can. As a project, we don't have a better connection to Apple than you do. > > One approach might be the engineer who replied to the Bluesky post that someone linked to above about the input issue. Pure incompetence. Major projec…

This is downvoted, but it's true.

It doesn't matter who's fault it is in some Aristotelean sense, what matters is the user upgraded to YOUR new OS, and now shit don't work.

Raymond Chen and Microsoft got this, years ago. Joel talked about it. You make shit work, even if it's the software being a fuck.

Re: Electron-based apps cause system-wide lag on macOS 26 Tahoe

#124
post #100
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely there is a more effective way to write an app than to bundle an entire end-of-life browser and Node.js runtime into a 600MB monstrosity.

Electron apps don't have to be 600 MB. VS Code is an entire fully-featured IDE and is a 90 MB download.

VS Code package in my applications folder is 600+ MB.

The Electron Framework.framework it contains is 400+ MB alone. I don't understand where you come up with your 90 MB figure?

Re: Electron-based apps cause system-wide lag on macOS 26 Tahoe

#125
post #68

This affects some of the most widely used applications on the platform, including "productivity" applications such as Slack that Apple uses internally. How did no-one at Apple notice this and do something about it prior to macOS 26 being released?

I stopped using the Slack Electron wrapper as soon as Safari added support for "installing" web apps (File > Add to Dock…). Wouldn't be surprised if people within Apple did similar.

Mind blown, this may actually be freaking useful ...

Re: Electron-based apps cause system-wide lag on macOS 26 Tahoe

#126

Notes from the Google bug tracker linked by the GitHub issue: applying this command to each Chrome/Chromium app impacting your system will workaround the underlying macOS resource leak (EDIT: which only occurs when Electron mucks with private APIs to fake having native UI): defaults write com.google.Chrome NSAutoFillHeuristicControllerEnabled -bool false https://issues.chromium.org/issues/446481994#comment17 That com…

GPU load bug and Autofill bug are two separate, completely unrelated issues.

I’m happy to refer to a better workaround if you have one?

Re: Electron-based apps cause system-wide lag on macOS 26 Tahoe

#128
post #43
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you mean “since release”. Hasn’t it always had horrible problems? I’ve never heard a good thing about it in use.

I used it from iOS 15-18 and it always worked great. We try to limit our kids' iPad use to drawing in Freeform and the occasional edutainment app, and I never had issues with them escaping Guided Access or it causing lockups. The fact that I can barely trust it to work properly on iPadOS 26 is a huge disappointment for me.

I’ve never used it myself (no kids) but I’ve long heard tales of kids being able to get around it, it miscounting time used allowing too much use, etc.

It sounds really nice for the intended purpose, just not reliable for many.

Re: Electron-based apps cause system-wide lag on macOS 26 Tahoe

#129

I’m surprised to see so little pushback in press to iOS/macOS 26. I’ve been part of the public beta and it’s been so weird going from “this sucks but it’s a first beta” through “it really isn’t improving much as time goes by” to “we’re a week from launch, there’s no way they release this after the Apple Intelligence fiasco”. And yet here we are. Performance issues, ui inconsistencies and garish design everywhere.

It's possible that the majority of people are fine with it. I thought it would hate it but I love iOS 26. It adds much needed depth and allowed me to turn off accessibility options.

- Button Shapes: Buttons actually look like buttons.

- Reduce Motion: Animations are a lot more fluid and the parallax effects are more subtle. They don't trigger motion sickness like the previous ones did.

- Larger Text: The worst areas of the UI have better contrast.

- Reduce Transparency: While there's more transparency effects, they're a lot better.

- Increase Contrast: If I do need to turn this back on it is a much better integrated effect than previous version.

The changes in macOS 26 are half-finished. Anything with raised glass looks like plateaus in the middle of a flat desert. Only half the apps have the new rounded corners on window and they do not match the rounded corners in the rest of the interface. They even cut off parts of the interface like the bottom of every scrollbar.

It's disappointing. I loved Windows 7's aero theme.

Re: Electron-based apps cause system-wide lag on macOS 26 Tahoe

#130
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Not Apple's fault" is up for debate; even if Electron shouldn't be doing this, Apple arguably shouldn't be pushing out updates that cause issues with wide-swaths of software that users use regardless.

We've had developer betas of macOS Tahoe since June. Standard practice for any mobile or desktop software is to start testing on the betas as soon as they're available. Unless this was a last-minute change before the final release, it's on the software developers to use the betas to prepare their software for upcoming releases.

Exactly. Who you blame depends on if it was introduced in beta 1 or RC.
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