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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)

#911

Post by pluma »

kungtotte wrote: post #483
pluma wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When did you switch? Atom was damned near unusable around 1.0, and VSCode was only a little better. The difference to now is night and day.

I first tried switching to Atom around 1.0 and it was a horrible mess.

I just switched to VSCode last month and it's been as nice to use as ST3 (actually even nicer because ST3 didn't have any code intelligence).

I've also used IntelliJ (or rather WebStorm) several times over the years and it always felt too sluggish and obnoxious.

For the record: I'm on Linux and have 32 gigs of RAM. So maybe I have lower standards for memory use and performance.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#912

Post by zero_shift »

stiGGG wrote: post #254
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing I find ionic about this whole article is that it's perfectly easy to only use Slack within Chrome as a normal web app. And the UI is almost exactly the same because it's nearly all the same code. So if the Electron bloat is such as issue for you, just hit Slack in the web directly.

>So if the Electron bloat is such as issue for you, just hit Slack in the web directly. That's even more horrible, i've tried it. Chrome uses his own notifications on macOS instead of integrating with systems notification manager and always when one of these ugly, poor animated guys pops up, i can search through my 100 open browser tabs to find the damn chat. Millions of flamewars were fought about what's the best wi…

I have Canary installed for this very reason. My mail app, Slack, Jira and any 'productivity' sites live on that, whilst everything else stays on good old Chrome. Switching from one context to another then becomes very straightforward.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#913

Post by magicalist »

notalaser wrote: post #53
Ambroos wrote: post #18

A lot of Slack's high (background) CPU usage is caused by GIFs, in my experience. Just did a quick check on my quadcore MBP, having Slack fullscreen out-of-view with nothing animated in view gives it a CPU usage of 0,1% with spikes up to 2,5%. Switch to a conversation with a single animated party parrot emoji, go to another fullscreen app once again, and CPU usage never drops below a whopping 22%. For an animated par…

> A lot of Slack's high (background) CPU usage is caused by GIFs, in my experience. Holy fuck, can you imagine the supercomputers that were required to display Geocities websites in the 1990s?

48x48 gifs with four frames of animation?

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#914

Post by pluma »

ori_b wrote: post #850
infogulch wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atom and VSCode are in different leagues with respect to performance, and the difference is growing with time. If you think the reason that Atom is slow is because of Electron, VSCode is the counterexample.

If VSCode isn't slow because of electron, what's the reason it's slow?

VSCode isn't slow. Atom is slow.

Since both are written with electron the difference must obviously be the actual implementation, not the platform itself.

Keep in mind VSCode was written by Microsoft who have decades of experience writing IDEs and text editors, whereas Atom was written by GitHub who are mostly working on the GitHub product.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#915

Post by sktrdie »

fifafu wrote: post #526
Spivak wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's basically no worse than Electron. Seriously, if browsers supported an app:// URL which just ran a local site with special privileges and allowed for some custom branding Electron would be dead overnight.

if they'd be giving you access to the complete node.js ecosystem maybe. With electron you can easily integrate native c++ libaries for high performance stuff or things that require hardware access. It's not like electron is just a webbrowser.

You can do all the C++ fast stuff you want on the server.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#916

Post by pluma »

rayiner wrote: post #661
pluma wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

VSCode doesn't compete with emacs and vim. VSCode competes with Sublime Text and Atom. Maybe even with WebStorm on the more full-featured end and Notepad++ on the leaner end.

I'm not even sure whether you're trolling. BBEdit provides a tiny subset of the features VSCode offers. VSCode is not a text editor, it's halfway between a text editor and a traditional IDE.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#917

Post by joking »

josephg wrote: post #199
yesimahuman wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the user experience is already great, so what's the gain? Electron and the web clearly make a first class app platform on desktop. EDIT: thanks for the downvotes. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how electron is keeping Slack and Spotify from building a massive business and how their desktop users find the experience so bad they don't use the tools obsessively. Clearly there are things to improve w/ Electron (en…

Its a terrible experience to discover my battery life is cut in half because of a cursor animation in VS Code, or to have my laptop heat up and the fans engage because of an animated GIF in slack. But its worse than that - most users don't even know why their battery life is awful. So they blame apple, or microsoft, or dell or whoever. And they just don't use their computers as much, because its all a bit gross and s…

A bug that it's a lot more easy to be discovered and fixed when it affects so many people, How many "native" apps have similar battery hogging bugs that are not fixed because nobody founds about them?

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#918

Post by Asooka »

notalaser wrote: post #53
Ambroos wrote: post #18

A lot of Slack's high (background) CPU usage is caused by GIFs, in my experience. Just did a quick check on my quadcore MBP, having Slack fullscreen out-of-view with nothing animated in view gives it a CPU usage of 0,1% with spikes up to 2,5%. Switch to a conversation with a single animated party parrot emoji, go to another fullscreen app once again, and CPU usage never drops below a whopping 22%. For an animated par…

> A lot of Slack's high (background) CPU usage is caused by GIFs, in my experience. Holy fuck, can you imagine the supercomputers that were required to display Geocities websites in the 1990s?

Well, back then we didn't have a composited desktop, so when the browser was out of view, no drawing was taking place. I kind of wish we would still have the option of programs just drawing directly to the screen rather than caching everything in private back buffers, but still use modern graphics techniques. I have a hunch that would actually be faster, since cpus have severely outpaced memory.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#919

Post by Asooka »

automathematics wrote: post #454

So many divisive opinions here, but in case anyone reads this far down, here's my 2 cents: - Yes, desktop apps existed before Electron. But the top comment is right. How many desktop apps. NOT utilities but full featured apps (like Spotify and Atom) that you loved either got swallowed up by other companies (Mailbox) or discontinued due to "lack of use" (read: lack of profitability). I'm sure if you dig deep you can r…

If you're doing a 2D game, won't SDL with Python and the assorted ecosystem be better than react native? IIRC the sprite operations are even accelerated with OpenGL these days.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#920

Post by koko775 »

flukus wrote: post #883
grinich wrote: post #404

At Nylas we made a huge bet on Electron-- our desktop app Nylas Mail actually started as a fork of Atom Shell before the project was rebranded to "Electron." To be honest, we would have never built this app without Electron. It allowed us to have a small team (2 devs) ship the first version of the app without learning an entire new dev toolchain on multiple platforms. There certainly can be performance issues with bu…

> To be honest, we would have never built this app without Electron. It allowed us to have a small team (2 devs) ship the first version of the app without learning an entire new dev toolchain on multiple platforms. There are a number of email apps around, why would I want to use one from developers that put their convenience above mine (and my batter life)? > But I predict it will be like Java-- everyone "hates" the…

Wrong on all counts.

I say this as someone currently writing a native desktop app and someone who doesn't like Android (having shipped substantial Android and iOS apps):

Android apps are not incredibly slow compared to native apps, and the ones that are aren't due to Java. Android has always _used_ the JVM, just not run binaries _on_ the VM – they created their own (Dalvik) because they couldn't ship a Java virtual machine, so they shipped a virtual machine and played bytecode games so the thing that ran wasn't Java bytecode, and it wasn't run on a Java-compatible VM.

Also, Android has and will be running on the JVM, because they're transitioning to OpenJDK.

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