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by EntrePrescott 1147 days ago
I hate embedded browser UIs like electron stuff as much as you do, but you're pointing your blaming finger in the wrong direction:

What do you expect application developers to do in absence of a natively compiling cross-platform GUI lib that is both good and with a nice licensing terms (e.g. a permissive open source license)? To put their application development on ice so as to develop that (which is a huge task in itself)?

If you want this situation to change and shitty browser-based UI to not be the go-to solution (for lack of a better cross-platform alternative for application developers), then feel free to go ahead and develop a native-compiling cross-platform GUI lib that plays in the same league as Qt, and make it available under a permissive open source license (unlike Qt).
1 comments
korijn 1146 days ago
You're pretending it was impossible to make applications before electron came around.
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EntrePrescott 1146 days ago
Nah, I'm not pretending anything of the likes in any way. In fact, the overwhelming majority of apps aren't cross-platform at all, so that's really the norm, not cross-platform frameworks.

All I'm saying is that unlike the native platform-specific frameworks (which are limited to the respective platform, but which the platform vendors make available free of charge under terms favorable to commercial app development), there no cross-platform frameworks that are simultaneously good and not encumbered by totally grabastically shite licensing/pricing terms, thus naturally leading to a wide majority of application developers either going platform-specific… and a large part of the rest (i.e. those who still want to do cross-platform) going with the ugly embedded browser solution (electron and the likes).

The browser-based approach, ugly as it is, happens to unfortunately be the only cross platform solution that is not encumbered by shitty app-developer-unfriendly licensing/pricing terms. Make a good, feature-rich and comprehensive cross-platform UI framework that is suitable both for desktop and mobile applications available under a nice permissive open-source license and you'll see lots of app developers use your framework instead of reluctantly using that browser shite (electron and such).

The dilemma is: who's paying for the development? A good feature-rich comprehensive UI framework is an enormous effort (both upfront and ongoing), and recouping that enormous cost is far from obvious unless falling into one of these categories:

* Platform-specific (i.e. not cross-platform): framework development financed by big platform vendor who makes framework available for free but platform-specific, in order to push their platform and make their money with the latter

* browser based frameworks: framework development cost greatly reduced by re-using a pre-existing browser engine developed by some big player who finances browser engine development because they have a commercial interest in pushing their browser

* Choosing a license that makes the financing of the framework possible by making the app developers pay mucho money… but then it will naturally be avoided by most app developers, especially given the existence of free alternatives (which may have other disadvantages, but those are orthogonal to that problem)

* A big player subsidizing the development cost by some cross-financing from money made otherwise: that has happened for some open source software and libs in other domains, but not for a good cross-platform UI framework so far unfortunately.

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