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Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

josephg.com

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Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#661

Post by rayiner »

pluma wrote: post #468
Veen wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you call "trade-offs" appears to me to be developers externalizing their costs onto users. There are costs to developing desktop applications and developers don't want to pay them, so they make users pay for them in wasted hardware dollars, bandwidth, RAM, battery life, and poor integration.

I've switched from Sublime Text 3 (native) to VSCode (Electron) and I couldn't be happier. If I didn't know it's electron based I wouldn't have been able to tell as a user. YMMV so don't generalise.

It's halves my battery life compared to Emacs or BBEdit.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#662

Post by pharrington »

pdabbadabba wrote: post #625
pharrington wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand. The cost is mostly externalized into, quite literally, massively distributed increased electricity consumption. That an individual's power bill may be subsidized only emphasizes that problem.

It sounds like we agree. To the extent we're just talking about electricity costs, then it's true that easily written, but inefficient code may indeed externalize these costs to the extent that users are unaware of the added power consumption, or that the user herself does not pay the full cost of that electricity. But these electricity costs struck me as only a small part of the broader point I was responding to, wh…

I contend that squandering the work and infrastructure involved in converting natural resources into electricity is the main problem with modern consumer software development. Any user's (lack of) perception of waste is irrelevant. The scope of the problem is not any individual literally paying a couple dollars more on their electric bill, but rather it's that gigawatt hours are literally being burned away because software developers who know their code will be running on machines the world over can't be assed to spend a little more time learning to practice their craft correctly.

There is no broader point than converting natural resources into societal infrastructure. Be a responsible member of society. Don't obstinately ship wasteful code. I understand if you legitimately don't know any better, but if you're part of the community that's constantly writing blog posts about computers being so fast that its OK to burn the end users' CPU and storage just so you don't have to spend a couple more minutes thinking about what you're doing, you're adding harm to the world.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#663

Post by lima »

jhasse wrote: post #654
lima wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite the opposite, they wanted to prevent vendor lock-in, so they pushed for standards like service workers and NaCL that eliminate the need for Chrome Apps.

But aren't those two only for getting better performance for web apps? Chrome Apps actually help getting a web app integrated into the OS, I don't see where (P)NaCl helps me with that.

Progressive web apps can be launched in a window just like a Chrome app.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#664

Post by michaelmrose »

baddox wrote: post #610
_jal wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is that true from a user's perspective? It is for this user. > What would Slack gain by integrating better with my Mac? Far better resource management, one would hope, for starters. As the article pointed out, when you're measuring your IRC client's memory use in hundreds of megs, there's a problem. It isn't uncommon for me to need to choose which "essential" apps to turn off to get something done on a maxed-out MB…

> when you're measuring your IRC client's memory use in hundreds of megs, there's a problem. Not really, unless you're using most of your RAM or you treat this as a fundamental principle. I've never checked my Slack RAM usage, and I'm sure it's higher than if they built a great native app, but it's also never had any performance problem with Slack or any other application (okay, except for Eclipse, but I stopped usin…

People are less likely to be spinning up vms but may have far less ram to start with and the more apps they use that are wasteful of power and ram the more likely this becomes an issue for them.

It is truly strange to hear being resource constrained being described as a special case in computing.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#665

Post by mi100hael »

AlphaSite wrote: post #579
ballenf wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... Electron applications are shite in comparison with proper native applications. Is that true from a user's perspective? The average user I know would not have the idea that Slack is somehow inherently worse than say MS Word or any other truly native app they use everyday. What would Slack gain by integrating better with my Mac? Slack starts up too fast for me to read the little quotation (penultimate Macbook Pro…

I actively don't use and discourage people from using Slack where I can because of how poorly it runs.

And because it's a closed-source, expensive implementation of IRC.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#666

Post by petre »

bhauer wrote: post #216
pdabbadabba wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to the extent that these costs degrade the user experience, I'm not sure they really are externalizing them. Presumably they pay this cost in the form of decreased user satisfaction. It's just that this is a cost they are willing to pay. There may be an interesting economic lesson here: it really is not that easy to externalize costs. It surely can be done (air pollution), but it requires some special circumsta…

> Well, to the extent that these costs degrade the user experience, I'm not sure they really are externalizing them. Presumably they pay this cost in the form of decreased user satisfaction. It's just that this is a cost they are willing to pay. Precisely. I don't use Slack in part because its desktop application is irrationally bloated for its use-case. Although I have other reasons as well, they are enduring a cost…

Why they haven't made Slack a web based chat app like Discord or Wire or even Skype is beyond me. I don't even use their native apps, just open a tab in my browser and run the corresponding web app.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#667

Post by daenney »

brilliantcode wrote: post #275
boskonyc wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely a demographic shift. And maybe business smart: cheaper to hire and onboard web devs etc. But that doesn't mean the company and its product shouldn't be critiqued for its architecture (even more so because it is a software company).

It's a demographic shift of those entering the tech workforce. I can see someone is downvoting comments that doesn't agree with time to market being an important driver in influencing architectural decisions. This is someone who is very mature and well seasoned in Java architecture. Software isn't just about making things fast as possible. You also have limited resources and have to make decisions on money in the ban…

> I can see someone is downvoting comments that doesn't agree with time to market being an important driver in influencing architectural decisions. This is someone who is very mature and well seasoned in Java architecture.

Ah yes. Someone who downvotes you, which you assume to be about the time to market comment of your argument, must naturally be a person "who is very mature and well seasoned in Java architecture".

What does that even mean to be "well seasoned in Java architecture"?

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#668

Post by apostacy »

sametmax wrote: post #476
apostacy wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> P.S: oh, and if electron is flash, remember that flash won the web for 15 years while it sucked. And you know why ? Because it allowed people to do stuff they wanted easily, like videos and animations. And it's not because we couldn't do it any other way, we could. Yet we had to wait almost 2 decades to see it dies, at the price of battery, stability, security and everything else. Feature trumps everything. People.…

They were crashing your browser all the time, hogging randomly CPU and were the worst vector of malware infection ever. They destroy select, right click, history, scrolling and copy/paste. But I get your point, it's was really handy. Only this year HTML5 videos are starting to be on par with flash videos. Those were so light to download.

Most of those problems have been replicated with HTML5. Yes, HTML5 can do some cool things. But I also find myself missing flash sometimes. HTML5 was not a replacement.

And, based on the direction things are going, I think it's only a matter of time until you can't even select text properly or scroll in a predictable way.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#669

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

Merad wrote: post #482
alexeiz wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no measurable amount of CPU (even to blink the cursor!) Is it really possible? What kind of alien technology is it?

I should say "measurable in task manager" - which reports in increments of 0.1%. Realistically I would imagine that a native Win32 app (Notepad++) that's totally idle except for message loop and cursor blink requires less than a microsecond of CPU time per wall clock second.

It gets better: the caret in "real" Win32 is not rendered to the framebuffer or any memory-backed surfaces, but is "inlined" in the video output the same way the (hardware) cursor is - it's effectively an old-school console sprite.

But it does mean you're limited in the things you can do with it - when Office 2013 gained that fancy animated caret they had to do it themselves, similarly the caret in Atom and VSCode are both software-based.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#670

Post by pharrington »

nojvek wrote: post #274
bhauer wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, to the extent that these costs degrade the user experience, I'm not sure they really are externalizing them. Presumably they pay this cost in the form of decreased user satisfaction. It's just that this is a cost they are willing to pay. Precisely. I don't use Slack in part because its desktop application is irrationally bloated for its use-case. Although I have other reasons as well, they are enduring a cost…

By walking just one day a year than taking my car, I can offset the electricity consumed by my laptop. You do have a point though. You make a difference where you can.

The problem is that despite how good it feels, individuals simply optimizing their individual activity does not scale to the societal scope. Post-agrarian humans literally behave and think via shared infrastructure. The only way individuals can make lasting improvements to society is to improve the infrastructure.
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