[OlympicMarmoto]

This is another common excuse.

You don't need to use microsoft's or apple's or google's shit UI frameworks. E.g. see https://filepilot.tech/

You can just write all the rendering yourself using metal/gl/dx. if you didn't want to write the rendering yourself there are plenty of libraries like skia, flutter's renderer, nanovg, etc

[jarek-foksa]

Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app to be reported in the past 10 years.

You will be outcompeted if you waste your time reinventing the wheel and optimizing for stuff that doesn't matter. There is some market for highly optimized apps like e.g. Sublime Text, but you can clearly see that the companies behind them are struggling.

[coldtea]

>Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app to be reported in the past 10 years.

I see complains about RAM and slugginess against Slack and countless others Electron apps every fucking day, same as with Adobe forcing web rendered UI parts in Photoshop, and other such cases. Forums are full of them, colleagues always complain about it.

[Aeolun]

Of course they complain about them, but those are the users, not the purchasers.

[sbarre]

How are Adobe and Slack/Salesforce doing?

Are they hurting for customers?

[lurking_swe]

the people that USE the software the most are not the people BUYING the software. it’s why all enterprise software has trash UX.

do you think i as a software engineer like using Jira? Outlook? etc? Heck even the trendy stuff is broken. Anthropic took took 6 months to fix a flickering claude code. -_-

[sbarre]

Yes that was my point.

[coldtea]

Not relevant point though. I was answering to this "I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app to be reported in the past 10 years", I wasn't arguing that such apps don't make money.

[frumplestlatz]

McDonald’s isn’t hurting for customers either. Doesn’t mean their food is anything a chef ought to aspire to.

[theGeatZhopa]

I'm loving it

[eviks]

McDonald's is renown for speed of service, a bit ironic to compare that to slow apps

[Citizen_Lame]

Maybe 40 years ago.

[afiori]

Neither it means that McDonald's should aspire to be a chef

[frumplestlatz]

Sure, aspiring to mediocrity at a cost to others is a choice.

[cpuguy83]

Not seeing complaints doesn't mean they don't exist. Not to mention ui latency that is common in electron apps that is just a low-level constant annoyance.

[adastra22]

I have complained about literally every Electron based app I have ever used. How would you know there are no complaints?

[oblio]

There are complaints and then users keep using these super popular and bloated apps. Techies make it seem like bloat is a capital sin but it isn't.

[adastra22]

When given the option, I never use such apps. I am rarely given the option, however.

[oblio]

Q.e.d.

He who holds the purse strings, decides. The people who pay to have the apps made get to decide and they have decided that what geeks want doesn't matter.

And every time a geek tries to change that, he only wins for a short while and then we're back to the primordial soup.

Oh, and regular users obviously don't care enough.

[frumplestlatz]

I don't bother complaining about Electron-based applications to the developer, and I expect that's not an unusual position. It's not like the downsides are hidden, unique, or a surprise, and if the developers' priorities aligned with ours, they wouldn't have picked electron in the first place.

I use web-tech apps because I have to, and because they're adequate, not because it's an optimal user experience.

[pregnenolone]

> Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app to be reported in the past 10 years.

Nothing is worse than reading something like this. A good software developer cares. It’s wrong to assume customers don't care simply because they don't know what's going on under the hood. Considering the downsides and the resulting side effects (latency, more CPU and RAM consumption, fans spinning etc.), they definitely do care. For example, Microsoft has been using React components in their UI, thinking customers wouldn’t care, but as we have been seeing lately, they do care.

[mdavidn]

I don’t complain about Electron because I didn’t install the app if I could avoid it.

[FranklinJabar]

> I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app to be reported in the past 10 years.

When was the last time complaining about this did anything?

[behnamoh]

> Customers simply don't care.

They do, but they don't know what's causing it. 8GB of RAM usage for Codex App is clown-level ridiculous.

[eviks]

That just means your feedback system is trash if it fails to surface such an obvious and common pain point in user experience. Tough that's an extremely common state of feedback systems. But also, the general computer knowledge isn't that high for every end user to connect some sluggishness in another app to your app wasting ram and causing disk swaps, that eliminates a lot of end user complaints

> reinventing the wheel

what exactly are you inventing by using a framework "invented" decades ago and used by countless apps in all those years?

[WD-42]

They don’t care, or they don’t know? What they do know is their computer that’s only 5 years old goes to shit with only a few apps open. Time for a new laptop.

Thanks for contributing to the obsolescence cycle.

[LinXitoW]

People absolutely care, but the issue is that no single company/app is really responsible. It's the tragedy of the commons, but for users RAM. No one electron app uses all the RAM, but just a couple are enough to make a common 16GB machine slow down massively.

[blackoil]

Even with SublimeText, most popular IDE is VSCode, most popular interface design tool Figma, all popular chat platforms and so on are all electron based. If people were desperate for faster platforms they'll be migrating to them.

[eviks]

> Even with SublimeText, most popular IDE is VSCode

What a weird comparison, one is free, another one is a premium app, of course a lot of people prefer some suffering over paying money

[frumplestlatz]

Your mistaking supply-side path dependent outcomes that produce a lack of consumer choice with consumer preference. No consumer prefers slow, bloated, non-native software, but they're stuck with what they can get.

[aurareturn]

There is competition for Figma. Sketch.

There's plenty of competition for VSCode too.

Don't forget that these Electron apps outcompeted native apps. Figma and VSCode were underdogs to native apps at one point. This is why your supply side argument doesn't make any sense.

[eviks]

> There's plenty of competition for VSCode too.

But there isn't, not if you include all the extensions and remember the price

[aurareturn]

So an Electron app won. Seems like Electron wasn't a hinderance.

[blackoil]

all the extensions followed popularity and ease of development. So, cart horse.

[deaux]

Do a search for "Microsoft teams slow crash" and you'll find a billion complaints by normies.

They're only doing well because of their illegal monopolistic practices not being cracked down on.

[marxisttemp]

I care. I refuse to use Electron slop unless it is literally the only option available (usually due to some proprietary locked-in platform eg Discord). I will happily pay significant sums of money for well-made native apps that often have fewer features than the Electron versions, simply for the pleasure of using tools that integrate seamlessly with my operating system. Not all of us have given up on software quality.

[woah]

The various GPU-accelerated terminal projects always make me chuckle

[baq]

Not sure why, terminals are literally GPU accelerated text rendering solutions since the very beginning of rendering text

[vel0city]

Heck, not even just a separate card or whatever, back in the terminal days where you practically had a whole separate small computer just to display the output of the bigger computer on a screen instead of paper.

[ponector]

Because there is no point in reporting such complains. Just a waste of time.

[luckman212]

> Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about microplastics in the past 10 years.

> You will be outcompeted if you waste your time reinventing the wheel and optimizing for stuff that doesn't matter. There is some market for safe, environmentally-friendly products, but you can clearly see that the companies that make them are struggling.

ok.

[incr_me]

How is File Pilot for accessibility and for all of the little niceties like native scrolling, clipboard interaction, drag and drop, and so on? My impression is that the creator is has expertly focused on most/all of these details, but I don't have Windows to test.

I insist on good UI as well, and, as a web developer, have spent many hours hand rolling web components that use <canvas>. The most complicated one is a spreadsheet/data grid component that can handle millions of rows, basically a reproduction of Google Sheets tailored to my app's needs. I insist on not bloating the front-end package with a whole graph of dependencies. I enjoy my NIH syndrome. So I know quality when I see it (File Pilot). But I also know how tedious reinventing the wheel is, and there are certain corners that I regularly cut. For example there's no way a blind user could use my spreadsheet-based web app (https://github.com/glideapps/glide-data-grid is better than me in this aspect, but there's no way I'm bringing in a million dependencies just to use someone else's attempt to reinvent the wheel and get stuck with all of their compromises).

The answer to your original question about why these billion dollar companies don't create artisanal software is pretty straightforward and bleak, I imagine. But there are a few actually good reasons not to take the artisanal path.

[w00ds]

File pilot is extremely good in my experience, literally the only issue is it doesn't display the sync status on icons in a Dropbox folder.

[josephg]

I'd love to see some opensource projects actually do a good job of this. Its a lot of work, especially if you want:

- Good cross platform support (missing in filepilot)

- Want applications to feel native everywhere. For example, all the obscure keyboard shortcuts for moving around a text input box on mac and windows should work. iOS and Android should use their native keyboards. IME needs to work. Etc

- Accessibility support for people who are blind and low vision. (Screen readers, font scaling, etc)

- Ergonomic language bindings

Hitting these features is more or less a requirement if you want to unseat electron.

I think this would be a wonderful project for a person or a small, dedicated team to take on. Its easier than it ever used to be thanks to improvements in font rendering, cross platform graphics libraries (like webgpu, vulcan, etc) and improvements in layout engines (Clay). And how much users have dropped their standards for UI consistency ever since electron got popular and microsoft gave up having a consistent UI toolkit in windows.

There are a few examples of teams doing this in house (eg Zed). But we need a good opensource project.

[ogoffart]

We're actually working on a native open source cross-platform UI toolkit called Slint that’s trying to do exactly that. https://slint.dev

[minton]

But Electron doesn’t hit that bar even

[josephg]

It gets pretty close.

Which parts in particular do you think electron misses from this list?

[ag220906]

yep, you're right to call that.

[embedding-shape]

> You don't need to use microsoft's or apple's or google's shit UI frameworks. E.g. see https://filepilot.tech/

That's only for Windows though, it seems? Maybe the whole "just write all the rendering yourself using metal/gl/dx" is slightly harder than you think.

[OlympicMarmoto]

The proof that rendering is not _that_ hard because the flutter team did it when they switched off skia (although technically they still use skia for text rendering, I'll admit that text rendering and layout is hard)

[mstipetic]

How is a fact that someone did something proof that it isn’t hard?

[bandrami]

I mean, every cross-platform commercial DAW manages to do it? Bitwig, Renoise, Reaper, even VCV.

[embedding-shape]

[delayed]

[anaisbetts]

That'll work great until your first customer from a CJK or RTL language writes in, "Hey, how come I can't type in your app?", or the blind user writes in "Hey how come your app is completely blank?" then you'll be right in the middle of the "Find Out" phase

These strategies are fine for toy apps but you cannot ship a production app to millions or even thousands of people without these basics.

[Macha]

“Render yourself with GPU APIs” has all the same problems with a11y, compatibility, inconsistent behaviour that electron has - the only one it might fix is performance and plenty of apps have messed that one up too

[browningstreet]

They’re all iterating products really fast. This Codex is already different than the last Codex app. This is all disposable software until the landscape settles.

[namelosw]

It's essentially asking application developers to wipe ass for OS developers like Microsoft. It's applaudible when you do it, understandable when you don't.

Even though OpenAI has a lot of cash to burn, they're not in a good position now and getting butchered by Anthropic and possibly Gemini later.

If any major player in this AI field has the power to do it's probably Google. But again, they've done the Flutter part, and the result is somewhat mixed.

At the end of the day, it's only HN people and a fraction of Redditors who care. Electron is tolerated by the silent majority. Nice native or local-first alternatives are often separate, niche value propositions when developers can squeeze themselves in over-saturated markets. There's a long way before the AI stuff loses novelty and becomes saturated.