[FRex]

It would still look quite shady. It's also burning electricity, hogging your CPU and putting heat and stress onto your CPU which is way worse than just displaying an ad which costs literally nothing (or 1 or 2 cents for fetching a single png and link).

I use one donationware app and it's cleanly marked it display an add and it's explained they fetch it from their own site via a dumb static image request on startup (it sits under the main GUI, it's not a splash or wait or anything) and for a donation you can get rid of it. That's leagues above the experience an average website gives you without adblocking software these days.

As for the size - I've no idea what happened, the original page[0] tested by [1] reports as 153 KB. Maybe he just wrapped it in electron?

[0] - http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/2048/ [1] - https://tools.pingdom.com/

[scarface74]

It would still look quite shady. It's also burning electricity, hogging your CPU and putting heat and stress onto your CPU

Like any other Electron based app...

[FRex]

This is false equivalence. The electron app is ostensibly working for your benefit, just in a very inefficient way, not mining a currency using your resources to ship off to someone.

You could argue that making users pay for savings in development by their RAM, Disk, CPU, GPU and electricity costs is also bad (and even bad for the planet) but that's a less shady business strategy for saving cost than covertly mining. I have argued that and similar points with varying success at [0]. Then again someone took it upon themselves to downvote this[2] 30 minute comment of mine already and offered no counterpoint so maybe bloatware is what people want and they will go out of their way to justify it.

Back to this topic: to stop mining requires stopping being shady and turn it off, to stop burning resources with electron requires huge staff changes, technology changes, mentality changes, etc. and goes against what Joel Spolsky said about rewrite from scratch[1] (but I do feel the irony every time I see Atom or something claim they have now way more performant code by rewriting a part of the program in C++).

It's also very unfair IMO to compare pure hearted electron users (whatever you think of people who use it and the tech itself) to someone who stealthily installs malware (which borders on a crime and is way more shady and immoral).

Coincidentally I found a very neat app for music conversion/extraction from videos today, it's light, starts instantly, the GUI never lags even for thousands of files, it's total size is 40 megs and I looked into it and it's just ffmpeg dll, some other dll for other media stuff and the main GUI is in Delphi (and to add insult to injury the author is a Pole, which is ironic because I am also a Pole and I was taught Delphi in high school too - as my first language - and use Lazarus from time to time to play around with Pascal and native GUIs again).

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15948290

[1] - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17055872

[scarface74]

and goes against what Joel Spolsky said about rewrite from scratch[1]

Joel at one time was the product manager(?) for Excel. Microsoft also got lambasted for trying to use an internally built cross platform solution to use the same codebase for Mac Office and Windows Office back in the mid 1990s. Microsoft even decided that it was better to use native tooling for both platforms.

There is a difference between "rewriting" and using native tools for each platform. Would you still want something using Java+Swing?

[FRex]

Why not? Is Java + Swing very heavy or something? Is NetBeans in Swing or something else? I've used NetBeans for C, C++, PHP and HTML5 on my old Core 2 Duo with 2 Gigs of RAM on Fedora during my uni years and it was fine by me. It lagged some but on that machine everything lagged and it was a full on IDE (not just a code editor) with some really nice features.

[scarface74]

A Core 2 Duo should not lag running an IDE. I ran Visual 2008 on a Core 2 Duo with Sql Server running and it had 4GB of RAM.

Netbeans and almost every other Java IDE at the time was one of my major turn offs about using Java compared to using .Net + Visual Studio.

In fact, I still use the same Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz with 4GB of RAM running Windows 10 as my Plex Server and it can transcode up to two streams simultaneously. I'll still use it interactively when I'm working from home and I'm mindlessly browsing the web while I am waiting on something.

[fjsolwmv]

You say "shady" but you don't explain why. I don't understand the distinction. I care about the quality of an app and how much it costs in $/CPU/RAM. Why should I care why it uses the CPU it uses?

If someone (legally) cloned an app, cut CPU in half, and replaced have the savings with mining, why would you prefer the original app?