[baumandm]

Don't use Electon. Your users WILL notice and complain about performance.

Is this actually true? Slack and Discord are valued at ~$7B and $2B respectively, and neither have found it necessary to move off their Electron apps. I assume both companies have already evaluated whether Electron's performance impacts their their bottom line, and concluded it does not.

Electron is undoubtedly slower and more resource-intensive than other options, but outside of specific audiences (HN readers) I bet most people won't care.

[fbelzile]

You're right. It's a relatively small, but persistent concern people have emailed me about. After a while, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

I know this because I'm temporarily using a Chrome-based WebBrowser component for called EO.WebBrowser (for edge-case reasons). I'm working on going back to the native WebBrowser control after getting about a few emails a month of emails asking about RAM usage.

It also shows up in the uninstall comments. Quote from a real comment: "The app works, but it uses a lot of RAM."

Slack and Discord are used for work, which might make users think of it a necessary evil. Paying for software yourself that you don't absolutely need and having it use lots of your RAM is a different story.

[nickjj]

> Electron is undoubtedly slower and more resource-intensive than other options, but outside of specific audiences (HN readers) I bet most people won't care.

I think it makes even more of a difference for people outside of the HN audience.

A non-technical person might grab a $400 laptop from Costco with 4gb of RAM which is fairly common.

All it takes are a few Electron apps to exhaust that entire system's resources.

[baumandm]

Fair points.

All I was trying to say was that Electron and other technical decisions should be evaluated by their actual business impact, which vary from app to app.

[anoncake]

But will a non-technical person know which apps are to blame?

[nickjj]

They will be able to determine "before I installed this app everything was good but now it's not" and then they will proceed to blame your app (with good reason).