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

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

#181
post #56

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.

Tahoe is the worst macOS release I've ever experienced in 20 years. I think not even Yosemite was that bad.

[dead]

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get it but a lot of the war stories from Raymond Chen's blog https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ were about helping major corporations unscrew something that had relied on a private Windows API because there hadn't been a good way to do it. I would guess most cases of people choosing to rely on a private method are laziness or lack of knowledge about "the right way" (or call it bad documentation), but not 1…

Discovering and using private APIs is not a walk in the park. I doubt "laziness" is a common motivation for doing so. Lack of knowledge or bad docs, perhaps. But there's often no officially sanctioned way to do something that people want (and perhaps will pay for) - most private API usage I've seen falls into this third bucket.

Laziness comes in many forms. Arguably, discovering and using private APIs is a form of intellectual laziness — it requires you to refuse acknowledging that the whole system is telling not to do things that way.

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

#183
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what a mess Windows is because of it. Can you point at any part of windows being a mess specifically because of backwards compatibility?

Control panel / settings

That one's incomplete migration rather than backwards compatibility. As in, they failed to move everything rather than moving everything but preserving the old way for compatibility with something.

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

#184
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.

My package app is 90mb

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, as some OS maintainer once said: WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE! Seriously. How hard is this rule to understand? We particularly don't break user space with TOTAL CRAP.

This situation seems to be more analogous to an out-of-tree driver which reaches into kernel internals, which Linux does break all the time.

if the out-of-tree driver does not touch kernel space, it should not be broken.

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

#186
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt he will - they didn’t change, his OS did, they worked before, post hoc ergo propter hoc. Anyway, they’re from different companies, how could they both be at fault? If he even identifies them as related - he probably had them both running at startup and never quits them.

How much cognition are we assigning to Joe in this hypothetical scenario? You make him out to be barely more capable than a lab chimpanzee dully poking at a screen to get some fruit. Give Joe a little credit, people aren't as dumb as you think.

non-tech people will think exactly like that

Software A an B works fine before update, after update, both breaks => whatever changed is the problem(in this case, the OS).

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

#187
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…

To be fair, AppKit is buggy/undocumented enough that you need to muck with the internals even for trivial things.

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

#188
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discovering and using private APIs is not a walk in the park. I doubt "laziness" is a common motivation for doing so. Lack of knowledge or bad docs, perhaps. But there's often no officially sanctioned way to do something that people want (and perhaps will pay for) - most private API usage I've seen falls into this third bucket.

Laziness comes in many forms. Arguably, discovering and using private APIs is a form of intellectual laziness — it requires you to refuse acknowledging that the whole system is telling not to do things that way.

If you defer to authority. That is, you accept that the people who made the API have the authority to dictate you what you can or can't do on your hardware (or for other people on their), that privating the parts of the API you need was a conscious decision (and not just laziness on their part) and that in general you listen to commands like that.

Even with just a shroud of hacker thinking that is not something programmers should easily accept.

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

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, for "pushing out updates that cause issues [with very common software]".

As a dev, if you use a private method, you've just taken ownership of the problem. I suggested to you in our contract not to do it, and that it would likely not be supported, and you did it anyway. Fix your shit, common software or not.

This is what an Apple engineer could write in the electron's github issue if they refused to fix it.

We're not discussing that, but that they have pushed an update without proper testing. You can see from the other comments that breakage is not limited to people using private methods.

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

#190

Electron haters are going to have a field day over this (obviously it's not an electron issue, but why they care?).

Joke’s on them, turns out that it is an electron issue.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45377917

It’s not.

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