[mch82]

> Nobody wants to be testing against multiple browser/rendering engines in 2019

Yes, lots of projects want multiple, competitive rendering engines.

It used to be that Windows was the only viable target OS for commercial software. Firefox and Safari gave IE competition and gave developers who wanted to target Mac and Linux a way to get a foot in the door. That kicked off the whole generation of web apps we’ve just lived through. If developers give up on Gecko and WebKit, then they allow a monopoly again. And since Electron is made by GitHub and is now owned by Microsoft, Microsoft will again have the monopoly (with the caveat that Google has primary influence over Blink).

Render engine competition keeps web standards relevant, which keeps the web open. Take away competition & we’ll be back in a world where people build to IE6 for a decade instead of targeting standard HTML/CSS/JS.

[vedantroy]

The point is that developers don't want to be testing against multiple browser/rendering engines--hence why Electron was built.

Maybe having multiple engines is good (although maybe the benefits are overstated since nowadays most engines align with the spec instead of implementing non-standard extensions like ActiveX), but it's not good for people for who want to quickly, and with low effort, develop desktop applications.

The point of the parent comment was that developers chose Electron over other frameworks for reasons such as speed of development, and DeskGap does not align with those reasons.

[kijin]

What developers want is important, but what users want is even more important. If a lightweight app is what users want, that's a good enough reason for at least some companies to consider DeskGap over Electron.

I'm sick of sluggish "native" apps on my i7 PC with fast SSDs and 32GB of RAM. I don't even want to imagine how those apps perform on low-end devices.

[icelancer]

> but what users want is even more important

Only developers and very tech-savvy people bitch about Slack. Your average person working in Sales, HR, or operations cares not for the memory footprint of Slack.

It's also not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. Yeah, it's slower than mIRC, fair enough. But IRC is dead to almost everyone and Slack took over, so it is what it is.

[saagarjha]

They do, but they misdiagnose it as "my computer is slow" or normalize it because that's all they're used to.

[arvinsim]

Anecdata but I never heard of that complaint for people I know that use Slack.

Maybe the circle I am in simply has great computers. But who knows.

[dmitriid]

Users don’t want a “lightweight app”. Users want an app with <a list of features>.

[arvinsim]

Exactly. If users are held at gunpoint and have to choose between a fast app and a feature rich app, I would bet they will choose the latter.

[userbinator]

Given what counts as "feature rich" these days (and it seems some developers are constantly removing things that users used to use), I doubt that.

Software used to be both fast and "feature rich" (relatively speaking), designed so users could "grow" and learn increasingly more of it. Now almost everything seems to have idiotically dumbed-down "flat" UIs that look simpler yet still manage to consume more resources than before.

The new Skype is a great example. Compare to something like this: https://www.microsip.org/ Yes, I know they're different protocols, but the point is that IM and audio/video call functionality doesn't need to take as much resources as Skype does.

[dmitriid]

The new Skype is a bad example. It's a perfect example of a designed-by-a-committee-of-managers product that tries and fails to understand the moving part of alternatives such as Slack, Facebook Messenger etc.

[jhgg]

The cost savings here is in download/package size, and not runtime performance. Chances are latest chromium is faster than the system web-browser.

[kijin]

Startup time matters. Chances are the system web browser is already cached in memory, whereas every Electron app wants to load its own Chromium runtime.

[EGreg]

I’m going to disagree. Over the two decades I have been programming I have come to appreciate the benefit of Open Source Collaboration vs competition. Competition between platforms is good, but it’s not the best. Because those who produce content waste millions of hours collectively trying to address every little quirky difference between the platforms. And the standards only help so much, whether it’s POSIX or WHATWG.

The real reason MS and IE were not so good is because they were a closed source monopoly! And moreover the copyright was enforced by the government.

Now even M$ switched over to WebKit / Blink.

Collaboration beats competition in the end.

Wikipedia beat Britannica quite handily. And it beat Encarta, too.

Open source beat closed source over time.

The Web beat AOL and Compuserve.

Science beat secret cults and alchemy.

Today Pharma is using patents and competition. People are prevented from building on each other’s work in microbiology but not in other sciences. Isn’t that wild?

I would rather have lots of people adding to one snowball platform, than having competing platforms. AS LONG AS that platform is open source and anyone can use it for any purpose. If your commits don’t make it into the core, just market them until they get popular enough. Compatibility is the goal, though.

[gpvos]

Chrome/Blink may be open source, but it's controlled by Google after Blink forked from WebKit. It's hardly collaborative.

[aaronbrethorst]

“M$”? Really? This isn’t slashdot.

[arvinsim]

It's good that you are advocating for render engine competition. But I think you think you are getting off tangent.

It has nothing to do with the point that trying to make your code work in multiple browsers/rendering engines is painful.

Wanting a project to work with multiple rendering engines just because is an idealogical decision.

[gpvos]

All software is political, so ideology is relevant.

[kkarakk]

The political ideology in play for the majority of software development is capitalism so we loop back to "if i can't get it done asap using this tool, i'm not going to use this tool"

[ahartmetz]

Externalities matter even in capitalism.