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by faitswulff 2687 days ago
> Not everyone on earth is a dev/gamer/video-editor. For regular people, electron is a cancer that needs to be nipped in the bud.

That's not how I expected that sentence to end. I don't think regular people are nearly as concerned with performance as the groups you listed are. Regular people are probably using Electron via Slack for work and if it's slow and bloated it's ultimately not their problem. Even a few seconds delay won't cost them anything when it's still a faster replacement for email.
2 comments
toyg 2687 days ago
The irony of talking about "regular people" and then using Slack as somebody "regular people" actually use.

"Regular people" are likely to encounter electron by using Telegram or Whatsapp on the desktop, or some recent MS product like Skype. Whether they care or not about bloat, I don't know. I know those chat programs used to have annoying problems with cut & paste and not supporting basic assistive technology (i.e. the "emoji keyboard"), but I have to admit they got better with time; if those fixes have made it upstream to Electron, then things are improving. They are still horribly opaque to native OS services like sharing facilities and whatnot, but it looks like OS developers themselves are throwing all that away these days, so...

I expect the real issue Electron might never solve is real support for more advanced assistive tech for the visually-impaired and other disabled people. That stuff barely works with traditional desktop tech as it is. Obviously that has never been an obstacle in the market at large, it mostly plays a part in public-procurement processes.

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AnIdiotOnTheNet 2687 days ago
As usual, "regular people" means whatever the poster needs it to mean in order for their argument to make sense. It's a straw man.
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sorenjan 2687 days ago
> "Regular people" are likely to encounter electron by using Telegram or Whatsapp on the desktop

Telegram is written in C++ and uses Qt. Maybe you're thinking of Discord?

https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop

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FiddlyPack 2687 days ago
Electron has a leg up in this regard long term, insomuch as the web is a platform that folks using assistive tech often use, Chromium is a reasonable target for assistive web technologies, and Electron apps have a higher chance of using accessible semantic building blocks by default.

Now, in practice? Yeah, not so good right now.

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chupasaurus 2687 days ago
Telegram Desktop is a Qt-based app and it doesn't run everything on top of QtWebEngine.
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fxfan 2687 days ago
How many non-devs (equivalent to the group of RAM < 6GB) use slack?
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fedesilva 2687 days ago
About 6k+ people use it in my org - the vast majority are not devs.
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eyko 2687 days ago
I work with a few organisations and small teams that use slack to communicate. They're campaigners, marketing types, logistics, finance, HR, and overall general staff working for businesses and organisations. I was also attending some university lectures recently (on history) and the class had a slack account which we were invited to join if we had any questions or needed support.

You also don't need to focus on Slack. Skype is an electron app. How many people use Skype to connect with their family?

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