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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)

#981

Post by easuter »

catshirt wrote: post #287
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…

seriously. and skype is a grand example of how shitty a native client can be. tired of this argument. if you put in the proper effort, your users won't care or notice.

The newer skype versions on Windows are web-based.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#982

Post by josephg »

vmasto wrote: post #409
hoschicz wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It uses WebViews heavily.

I'm not saying it doesn't, it's built on Chromium Embedded Framework. The author is claiming it's built on Electron, which is false.

Yep sorry about that - I've corrected the mistake in the blog post.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#983

Post by josephg »

mlsarecmg wrote: post #292
josephg wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hasn't it already been pointed out a thousand times now that this was just a bug in Chrome that has been fixed right away?

Sorry, I'm confused. Which part of this bad performance was a bug in chrome? The peaking up to 100% usage for a few hours? The shockingly bad performance rendering GIFs? The super high idle CPU usage? The high download size and ram usage?

I used the desktop slack client all of last year, and these kind of problems were present the whole time. This isn't some "oh, yeah there was some particularly egregious bug we shipped accidentally in October" thing. Whatever is making the slack client a bloated ball of crap is much worse than a simple, quickly fixed chrome bug. Its endemic.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#984

Post by nojvek »

Gracana wrote: post #326
nojvek wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree with you. I only use Slack from we app but I'm a heavy user of VSCode and Spotify. I believe in standardized Web API's rather than a clusterfuck of native API's. The problem here is the base platform Electron and underlying Chrome/Nodejs But as consumers we feel when our browser lags, so browser vendors optimize speed over memory and cpu, caching the shit out of everything. The Web is a dangerous plac…

> You are right, electron is a hog. Last I checked all, electron, chromium and Nodejs were open source. We can actually make a difference. Won't that encourage more companies to cut corners? How can producers of quality products compete when other companies can release prototypes that their paying customers finish for them?

There's the argument "Why should I do it? If I'm paying for it then they should do it"

And there's, "This really sucks, its an open source project, I think I can make a difference that would affect millions in a small way but would still make a big impact overall"

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#985

Post by ziikutv »

bhargav wrote: post #749

Electron is flourishing because of low barrier to entry like many already touted. But lets ask something [probably] more constructive? I've made 3 apps with Electron that I could probably never make since I would be busy learning OS specific things. Can we not have low barrier to entry for creating native apps? Are there any solutions/frameworks that one can utilize? Is it just a matter of poor documentation/support…

So many up votes (thanks for taking the bait!)

But I really am wondering:

> Can we not have low barrier to entry for creating native apps? Are there any solutions/frameworks that one can utilize? Is it just a matter of poor documentation/support from OS makers? What is it?

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#986

Post by dang »

smokeyj wrote: post #403

There's two kinds of developers. Dorks who care about programming, and programmers who care about creating deliverable value. What do consumers think about electron apps? That's all that matters. Consumers don't know what the heck electron is, only that their apps work seamlessly across platforms. The only people who complain about electron apps are dorks who have an axe to grind with web developers. I'd rather have…

Your comment here broke the HN guideline against calling names in arguments. Please don't do that; it degrades discussion.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#987

Post by Tloewald »

BatFastard wrote: post #710
Tloewald wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron is like almost any other cross-platform VM, including Java (which is living under most of the "native" apps on the world's most popular platform), .NET, and so forth. It doesn't share resources between instances but then you also don't get dependency hell (wrong version of Java for application X, etc.) Subjectively, I'd say that Electron's performance overheads are not bad compared to, say, Smalltalk in the…

There are always bad engineers. I can write a shitty function in any language.

I've never seen anything performant built on top of Smalltalk, including the Xerox Star's built in apps which were developed by universally acknowledged geniuses. Flash's performance issues were legion.

Chrome is widely considered the best current desktop browser in a very competitive space. If it has problems it's definitely in idle power consumption (which indicates wasted idle CPU) but it is used by a hell of a lot of people who have free alternatives.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#988

Post by niutech »

d--b wrote: post #196

Electron is just another proof that ease of programming matters. Node.js too was a terrible idea. Who in their right mind would write server-side javascript? It turns out: pretty much anyone who didn't want to have to screw around for hours before being able to respond to a simple http request. Similarly, it is way harder to write a desktop app than a browser app. DOM / CSS manipulation, however bad they are, are yea…

There is Libui-Node (https://github.com/parro-it/libui-node) for creating native UI in node.js.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#990

Post by niutech »

shadowmint wrote: post #323

yeah yeah. It's bad. So big. So slow. So bloated; so... What's your alternative? I don't see any meaningful suggestions in this article, just complaints. You don't like how resource intensive electron apps are? Well, don't use them. If its really a big deal, people not using the apps will inform the people making the apps that they're bad. That's not happening, so clearly it's not a big deal for most people. Still...…

The alternative mentioned in the article is React Native, which runs on iOS/Android/Ubuntu/OSX/Windows.

Another lightweight alternatives to Electron are: Mozilla Positron (https://github.com/mozilla/positron), Webkit for Android/Windows (https://github.com/daewoong-jang/webkit-android) and Qt Quick (https://www.qt.io/qt-quick/).

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