[jefftk]

> If Electron was built with Gecko, it would go a huge way towards preventing Chrome from becoming the de-facto way of accessing the Web.

People coding specifically to Chrome when writing Electron apps is way less harmful to the web than people doing the same with web pages. The latter case specifically hurts other browsers, because people who don't use Chrome can't use the site.

Additionally, each Electron app represents a (smallish group of) developers. They're a very small number compared to all the developers writing public-facing websites that (should!) work in all commonly used browsers.

[thawaway1837]

It makes a difference though. The fact that Chromium is Electron’s backend is why MS picked Chromium to base Edge off. It’s likely they would have chosen something else if that wasn’t the case (or maybe continued with their own web tech).

[jefftk]

> It’s likely they would have chosen something else if that wasn’t the case

Brave is run by ex-Mozilla folks and started with Gecko, but switched to Blink very early on. [1] Their reasons didn't include Electron, so Microsoft's may not have either.

[1] Collection of tweets, and a response from someone at Brave: https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/9jpqde/brave_br...

(Disclosure: I work for Google, though not on Chrome. Speaking only for myself.)

[roca]

> The fact that Chromium is Electron’s backend is why MS picked Chromium to base Edge off.

What evidence do you have for this?

AFAIK the main reason why Microsoft picked Chromium is that Web sites are pretty much guaranteed to work well in Chromium without Microsoft having to do any work.

[leeoniya]

> What evidence do you have for this?

they stated that their experience with CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) was instrumental in their decision.

VSCode (built on electron) was probably the main PoC for them.

[roca]

OK. I doubt the absence of CEF would have changed their decision though.

[alibert]

Not strictly evidence but look like MS is working to have a shared base install of Electron on Windows.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/hosting/webv...

[roca]

FWIW that is apparently for "rendering Web content" inside a Windows application, and that's what the examples do; not clear to me that it's exposing Electron.

[Ygg2]

Electron is nice for a quick and dirty app. Sadly, people think it's ok to use it for making apps that people are going to use.

What I mean by this - I can recognize a non-Elector vs Electron app by the amount of RAM it consumes. Is your simple color picker/text editor/REST caller/mouse config/ToDo app taking 1GB+ of RAM? It's an Electron app.

For the record, I doubt FF based app would face much better.

[bombela]

And the CPU usage spike as you type into a simple textbox. Without even looking at RAM usage. Text input lag and UI slowness gives it away at the first interaction.

At this point, I could almost tolerate the wasted RAM and CPU if interaction latency wasn't that bad.

[Ygg2]

Well you gotta shuffle those GBs.