[janoc]

In other words - replace one horrible mess with another for what is ultimately only a web app.

Moreover, it is a complete red herring - there is not much advantage in a "much more up to date browser" in an app that will ever open/download a single page (so security or newer standard support is rarely a problem). Never mind that even the Electron apps can be (and are) updated frequently.

Also, PWAs are unable to do many things that Electron apps can as PWA is still ultimately in a browser sandbox whereas Electron runs a Node.js backend that can do pretty much anything a regular desktop app can (networking, access hardware, etc.).

That said, I am certainly not advocating Electron, it is a horrible kludge leading to poorly designed applications that break desktop usability conventions constantly, are enormous resource hogs and require weird workarounds for doing basic stuff only for the sake of being able to do user interface in HTML and javascript.

[ryukafalz]

>Also, PWAs are unable to do many things that Electron apps can as PWA is still ultimately in a browser sandbox whereas Electron runs a Node.js backend that can do pretty much anything a regular desktop app can (networking, access hardware, etc.).

This is precisely why I would prefer many of the Electron apps that I've used to be PWAs instead. For many apps I don't trust them with access to e.g. my entire filesystem; a PWA would get me the nice UI, notifications, etc of a native app while still keeping them in their sandbox.

[janoc]

The problem is that those apps are often Electron because they can't be done as a pure browser app. If the browser doesn't expose some system API then what do you want to do?