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Electron is Harmful

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Re: Electron is Harmful

#31

Post by curtisblaine »

Derbasti wrote: post #27
wilkystyle wrote: post #5

As someone who doesn't particularly like Electron, I have an honest question: Why all the hate? Sure, it's slower and less resource-efficient, but is anyone making you use it? Yes, it makes it easier to "just use your web developers" instead of hiring native app devs, but how many of those apps would even exist if the only path was to develop a native app? Electron is too slow for me, so I just stick to e.g. Emacs an…

I have a Surface 3. It has enough memory for my web browser, but not much more. Atom is out of the question, Spotify grinds it to a halt, slack is a horrible experience. But you know what works great? Emacs, a shell, Python, video players, bittorrent, ffmpeg. I. e. native apps. Well, that sucks for me, right? I could just hop on my 64 GB, 32-thread desktop PC right? As a matter of fact, I could, because I am an entit…

> As a matter of fact, I could, because I am an entitled white western dude. But the rest of the world can't. I wonder how the Atom vs Emacs debate plays out in China or India or Africa.

So there will be companies writing less demanding software for less developed countries that will reap all the market, audience and benefits, right?

This is similar to the diversity argument: "hiring a diverse team is beneficial! only staying diverse you can have innovation" is similar to "billions of people are stuck with slow hardware and ancient OSes - these are the markets of the future".

Guys, why don't you all form a diverse team, go capture the market of the future and become billionaries in the process while we keep on writing Electron apps? Sucks to be us, right?

Re: Electron is Harmful

#32

Post by curtisblaine »

> You are not your end-users, and you if you are a developer most likely do not run average hardware.

Then your end users won't buy your product and you will be forced to write a native application to not go out of business. But if your users can run it and your product is successful (ie Slack) why do you need to spend more resources to make it native?

This is like the "supporting IE matters" thing. It does matter if your target uses IE. If only a negligible slice of your target uses IE, it doesn't matter.

Re: Electron is Harmful

#33

Post by francisl »

shampto3 wrote: post #10

Articles complaining about electron pop up at least once every month. One thing I always see missing from them is a better idea. The reason electron is prevalent in businesses nowadays is because it's easy to develop and deliver to customers. Apparently this comes with the price of performance loss. Please, the next time you feel the need to use your time to write an article about how electron is "cancer", try spendi…

As a full time web developer, I liked the idea of electron. Even if I dislike electron apps that I need to use at work (like slack memory glutton).

It gave me the impression that I can build desktop app faster by reusing my skills. When it was time to build some side project, I did them in electron.

Recently I decided to learn c#, for unity initially, but I decided to try xamarin. This change all my perceptions. Not only building the core was way more enjoyable that with js/babel/nameit. Prototyping the native interface was faster, and developing the final UI was also more productive. Not to mention the final product looked better.

Comparing developer productivity is hard, but based on my own experience, I would say that it would have taken twice the time on electron the finish the same app in the same time. Compare to my other similar electron project, it load faster, don’t use cpu cycle on idle and consume ¼ of memory.

Maybe there is better idea than xamarin, but at least is seems like a better idea than electron. Now I see more electron as a fast way to have a webapp on the desktop or a fad based excuse to not learn something new.

On the other hand, calling a "cancer" is quite absurd.

Re: Electron is Harmful

#34

Post by butz »

lewisl9029 wrote: post #7

Any reason why there's not more support for the Progressive Web Apps standard on desktop browsers [1]? It seems to me that many Electron apps these days (most chat apps: Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, etc) are super-thin wrappers around a web app that don't actually need the full desktop access offered by Electron (things like local filesystem access, multi-process execution, multi-window management, arbitrary node APIs,…

I'm 100% in on the PWA on desktop idea. It's already implemented in mobile browsers, how hard should it be to implement it on desktop? As a bonus you'd get always up to date apps and browser runtime, saving your bandwidth, because there will be no need to re-download electron runtimes.

Re: Electron is Harmful

#35

Post by lostmsu »

helixten wrote: post #21
lewisl9029 wrote: post #7

Any reason why there's not more support for the Progressive Web Apps standard on desktop browsers [1]? It seems to me that many Electron apps these days (most chat apps: Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, etc) are super-thin wrappers around a web app that don't actually need the full desktop access offered by Electron (things like local filesystem access, multi-process execution, multi-window management, arbitrary node APIs,…

I think pwa can replace many election app, MS thinks so too they are allowing them in the app store.

You mean UWP JavaScript apps?

Re: Electron is Harmful

#36

Post by mamcx »

TheCoreh wrote: post #15
mamcx wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sure, it's slower and less resource-efficient, but is anyone making you use it? Yes. Is impossed on the users by the developers using it.

You can just use an alternative. If the company you work for is mandating that you use specific tools, that's a different issue, orthogonal to electron.

Which alternative can be used if the app is made only with electron?

No all apps have multitude of implementations.

Re: Electron is Harmful

#37

Post by mamcx »

hannofcart wrote: post #18
mamcx wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sure, it's slower and less resource-efficient, but is anyone making you use it? Yes. Is impossed on the users by the developers using it.

>Yes. Is impossed on the users by the developers using it. No more than chocolate is "imposed" on people consuming it by the chocolate manufacturers.

And yet is still correct to point this.

We decide what to imposse on the user by the choices we make.

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