[hankman86]

Java Web Start always seemed like a lazy approach to bring legacy desktop apps into the web. Something you would associate with enterprise software, where end user experience apparently does not matter. I remember lengthy downloads of jar files, where eventually, some desktop window using very 1990s-looking Swing widgets would pop out. Not to mention that you needed to download a JRE (don’t remember if this was automatic on first launch).

Even in the heydays of Java, desktop applications were never all that great. I remember how painfully slow Eclipse ran. And when I tried the WebStorm IDE a few years back, all the same problems still existed re memory management and some pronounced latency pressing a key and having the character appear on screen. WebStorm was also infamous for its code indexing runs, which pretty much froze my computer for a number of minutes. Not sure if that’s a Java problem though.

People criticise Electron, but honestly: applications like Slack, Spotify and VS Code run much better than the Java-based desktop apps that I got to use.