[a_wild_dandan]

It almost never is. While HN contrarians endlessly complain about it, the rest of the world happily ships Electron. Discontent with Electron is so comically over represented here that I'm beginning to think it's an insecurity or complex or something.

[beeboobaa3]

It's simple:

Electron is great for developers because it allows them to easily build a cross platform app. Businesses love it for this reason.

Most users don't care. They barely realize what software is to begin with, and the mere suggestion that things could be different is baffling to them.

Then you have the highly technical users who know the software could be better, but isn't, because of the previous points.

[ASalazarMX]

In my experience, some regular users also dislike the UX of websites as applications, and that's what Electron apps are. They feel heavier than native software, the UI elements tend to redraw and jump around unexpectedly, and the keyboard response is noticeably slower.

You can recognize them because they dislike the feel without even knowing what's an electron app. I can vouch they're not insecure about Electron.

[bschmidt1]

Only if using DOM right? If someone ported a WebGL game to Electron the same 3D engine would be at play. Or 2D canvas for that matter. I think you're specifically referring to the overhead of browser DOM and how elements therein load, focus, apply styling, etc.

[Der_Einzige]

I hate every Electron app I use, and that includes vscode.

There is a unique type of jank associated with it.

Would love to live in the apparently "bizzaro" world where desktop class apps developed using tools which try to be more native to the OS were still successful in 2024.

Every update to Adobe creative suite makes it more and more close to an electron app and further and further away from it's roots as one of the premiere high end desktop caliber programs. I interpret the rise of Electron to be mostly correlated with the lack of knowledge on how to do old school desktop GUI development among the folks who teach CS education.

I expect that fl studio, photoshop, word, and every other remaining good desktop caliber app will be lost to the "make everything a in web-browser" trend, eventually. I'm so over it and it hasn't happened yet.

This is also the reason why GenAI STILL has no good prosumer tools. ComfyUI/Automatic1111/Forge/lm-studio are the closest we have and they're gradio or electron webapps which indicates that AI folks are not down with leaving the python or JS ecosystem for even a minute.

This means we need good desktop caliber GUI developers who understand AI. Unfortunately, they basically don't exist.

Thus, the world runs SOTA models on janky shit gradio or electron frontends instead of the desktop GUI's we had for similar UIs 10-20 years ago.

Word 2003 was peak software, and I'll never change my mind.

[fourfour3]

For me the problem with Electron is the “uncanny valley” effect - every app implements its own UI elements, and nothing is quite the same as the OS’s native behaviour.

Different apps have different unique quirks/odd behaviour, almost none of them do the right thing on platforms like macOS.

[trollied]

I do find it sad that native apps were quick and snappy back in the day, but now everything is effectively a browser, and has a DOM that needs to be parsed and dealt with, thus negating the hardware Moore's Law improvements that have happened since.

There must be a better way.

[brailsafe]

I used to feel the same way until Apple started dogfooding their ill-performing SwiftUI. The insane hardware packed into M1-3 chips compensates for it a bit (not always), but especially on my Intel mbp it can be jankier than most of the electron apps I interact with regularly. If VSCode was as janky as the "native" Settings app on macos I sure as hell wouldn't use it

[FactKnower69]

yea man, I think it's stupid for a text editor like Atom to be 200mb and take up 1gb of ram because I have a "complex". I'm annoyed at the 120 independent copies of CEF on my computer using 20gb of disk space because I'm "insecure"