Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

josephg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

731–740 of 1001 posts

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#731

Post by platinumrad »

smokeyj wrote: post #472
MarkMc wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with the content of your message, just wish you had used a word less derogatory than 'dorks'

I don't think it's derogatory enough. There's always these same rehashed arguments against electron - and it's always because of the same reason. The developer thinks he's a special snowflake and knows something that everyone else doesn't. He knows the "right way" and everyone else is dumb for not realizing it. FTA: It turns out modern operating systems already have nice, fast UI libraries. So use them you clod! FTA:…

Having trouble figuring out what "dork", "hipster", and "neckbeard" have in common other than the latter two terms both having become completely meaningless due to abuse and overuse.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#732

Post by sametmax »

camgunz wrote: post #686
sametmax wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, my point is people will use anything that allow them to do what they want the easiest way possible, not matter the cost and cleaness. The point is the web is the most active platform. The point is doing things right is not winning. The reason you are missing the point is that you think it's only a technical problem. It is not. It's technical + cultural + societal + historical + economical. > It's hilariously easy…

Thanks for clarifying :) You're right, I missed the point. > people will use anything that allow them to do what they want the easiest way possible, not matter the cost and cleaness. I disagree, because people are implementing things in Rust right now even though it's harder than doing it in JS. Generally, they do that because they care about things like performance, safety, and maintainability. For them, "harder" is…

I agree with you on all the things we should do. And I like dinosaurs too.

But sentences like this one are a good example of why electron succeeded:

> The Qt license comes up all the time, and it's seriously just don't link your app statically.

The last 3 people I met coding electron have absolutely no idea what linking is.

You are, quite literally, overqualified to understand electron's success.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#733

Post by ori_b »

brightball wrote: post #474
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…

The real trick is whether or not users care about: A) This works on all of the platforms that we use vs B) Performance could be better on my computer It's been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems...which is almost entirely because SSD's make them so much less noticeable if you start dipping into swap unless you're really working out your machine. For most us…

> It's been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems.

This annoys me a lot, for one of two reasons. Either:

1. Some developers have no idea what performance means -- it's crazy that I have time to notice a spinner when a glorified IRC client starts up or switches tabs, let alone have time to watch it for tens of seconds.

or:

2. If these developers are claiming they have no performance problems, clearly the laptops that can handle modern applications are being hoarded, and I have no way to obtain one of these magical machines. All I can get are recent i7 processors.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#734

Post by sametmax »

mpweiher wrote: post #694
sametmax wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the problem here. Your post illustrate it perfectly. You just ignore what the market is saying because "you are right". You are completely missing the point.

Maybe you are ignoring the market? I work on Wunderlist. One of our key differentiators, the thing customers love , love , love , is native apps on the major platforms (iOS, macOS, Android, Windows), in addition to an outstanding Web app. We quickly got several million customers, were acquired by Microsoft for "an undisclosed amount". http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/2/8707883/microsoft-wunderlis...

They love having a "not in browser app". Most users have no idea what native mean. Only technical people do.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#735

Post by ori_b »

anaisbetts wrote: post #74

Here's the thing. You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet, the answer is, "It wouldn't exist at all". Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it, and it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x…

If you ship an electron app, I don't bother downloading it. I usually just move on. If I don't have a good choice, I suck it up and use the web app.

Electron isn't a better experience, and if it's in a browser, at least it can share some resources with other web pages.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#736

Post by sametmax »

apostacy wrote: post #668
sametmax wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Few people rewrite scrollbar with HTML5 based tech. I have yet to see a virus propagate because of a W3C web API. For the memory/battery though, you are more and more right every day.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#737

Post by abiox »

bobwaycott wrote: post #148
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.

Everything in the world of web-stack development has turned externalizing costs onto users as a core first principle.

it's been that way since forever. if you're not employing expensive top-ranked brilliant engineers writing aggressively optimized, completely bespoke c applications tuned to every cpu model's feature set and performance characteristics... you just might be externalizing.

insofar as it benefits the budget, you should probably externalize as much as possible. consumers will provide the fitness function through deciding what products they prefer.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#738

Post by zwetan »

BatFastard wrote: post #713
zwetan wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well... actually "flash for desktop" best known as Adobe AIR is a pretty good alternative to Electron.

And is Electron more secure? I guess it doesn't have hackers all around the world trying to find vulnerabilities. Is that good or bad?

that does not apply to desktop app

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#739

Post by jackmott »

anaisbetts wrote: post #74

Here's the thing. You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet, the answer is, "It wouldn't exist at all". Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it, and it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x…

It is good that there is a nice cross platform 'thing' you can use to make desktop apps. But it would be better if the best thing that existed for this wasn't so slow.

Perhaps someone can clone the outward api of electron with only a ~10% performance penalty instead of Two orders of magnitude

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#740

Post by Volt »

michaelmrose wrote: post #664
baddox wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Last time I taught undergrads (last semester) their computers were far from anything as good as we'd have. If I asked them to run anything remotely demanding, it really taxed their laptops.

We really do need to be more mindful of resource usage. I'd rather write my own lightweight clone of something I want than use an Electron-based hog. There are menubar-only apps that come with an entire Electron dependency.

Post reply on HN