this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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Folks in this thread complaining about Electron I think miss the point. It is a trade-off. It is designed to allow engineers who have a web dev skillset to write desktop apps. For those like me who want to write the occasional hobby app - it's great. It's also great for orgs to be able to have cross functional teams. Just like React Native allows this for the mobile world. This could be because they're small and can't afford specialist native engineers for each platform they want to support - or it could be that they want to spend their money in other areas and happy to trade off app performance. If it was as lean or as performant as native apps there would be a lot of people in this thread looking for work.
It's not terrible, electron is good for stuff like what you discuss
I just like native apps better haha
Native apps have the potential to be better than electron apps for sure. I get that.
This is a surface level thing though - the question is: would THIS app, written by THAT organisation be better if it was native? Unlikely because they don't have the skillset for it...otherwise it would have been a native app. Its also likely that less apps would even exist because the barrier to entry is higher without electron and similar.
But this is just a meme and I'm taking this way too seriously!
Electron is just the "easiest, most common option", because things like TauriJS and NeutralinoJS exist, which do what electron does without having to bundle a whole-ass Chrome browser.
It's still terrible because of its ram usage, electron uses minimum 300Mb per instance so that's 3GB for 10 apps while if you open them all in Chrome you save 100s of mb
Chrome won't give Web apps access to the file system amongst other things. I'm a firm proponent of web apps - but they can't do everything a desktop app can, and so electron offers an alternative with the trade offs I mentioned.