[observationist]

They could have done better. They chose the path of least resistance, putting in the least amount of effort, spending the least amount of resources into accomplishing a task.

There's nothing "good" about electron. Hell, there are even easier ways of getting high performance cross platform software out there. Electron was used because it's a default, defacto choice that nobody bothered with even researching or testing if it was the right choice, or even a good choice.

"It just works". A rabid raccoon mashing its face on a keyboard could plausibly produce a shippable electron app. Vibe-bandit development. (This is not a selling point.) People claiming to be software developers should aim to do better.

[Gooblebrai]

> They could have done better. They chose the path of least resistance, putting in the least amount of effort, spending the least amount of resources into accomplishing a task

You might as well tell reality to do better: The reality of physics (water flows downhill, electricity moves through the best conductor, systems settle where the least energy is required) and the reality of business (companies naturally move toward solutions that cost less time, less money, and less effort)

I personally think that some battles require playing within the rules of the game. Not to wish for new rules. Make something that requires less effort and resources than Electron but is good enough, and people will be more likely to use it.

[observationist]

Shaming the use of electron? I'll do that every day and twice on sunday. Same with nonsense websites that waste gigabytes on bloat, spam users with ads, and feed the adtech beast. And I'll lay credit for this monument to enshittification we call the internet at the feet of Google and Facebook and Microsoft.

Using electron and doing things shittily is a choice. If you're ever presented with a choice between doing something well and not, do the best you can. Electron is never the best choice. It's not even the easiest, most efficient choice. It's the lazy, zero effort, default, ad-hoc choice picked by someone who really should know better but couldn't be bothered to even try.

[llbbdd]

What alternative did you have in mind when you said there are even easier ways of getting high-performance cross-platform software built?

[observationist]

The power move would have been Cosmopolitan, or a package similar to it.

https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

Cosmopolitan can be used to bundle up any gui package, and your code, and a team of professional software devs should be able to cope with it just fine. You end up with a native executable with a slightly bigger package to ship, since it's carrying executables for various platforms, but you'd effectively have the same code and behavior everywhere. A few extra megabytes, instead of whatever the hell electron is doing. They could also use Java, or even one of the electron type clones that attempt to be better, like Tauri.

The point isn't that electron is so awful. It's that the company with the purportedly best coding AI and one of the best overall AI models in the world chose to do the absolute tawdriest, cheapest, even laziest thing without any consideration of what the right thing to do might be, or what thing they could do that demonstrated their excellence and mastery of craft, or at a bare minimum, the advanced capabilities of the AI.

Cursor used claude to build a browser from scratch; it's not like their AI couldn't do it.

[salad-tycoon]

I don’t code, so I’m well out of my league but this point of “premier coding AI company should showcase its capabilities by using their own model to build superior software” rings true to me, right? Especially as we start to discuss AI as more dangerous than nuclear weapons yet it can’t even do that?

Who’s got the rebuttal to this?

[ivan_gammel]

It might be a strange thing to say, but Java is still viable alternative route. You can build a nice and fast cross-platform desktop application on it today. The language was designed for this kind of things. The entry barrier is quite high though.

[dmix]

I might hate Qt apps more than I hate Electron so I'm curious about the answer too.

[wolvesechoes]

Whats is wrong with Qt apps? Take too little RAM?

[llbbdd]

As far as I can tell after a quick Google, you can't share your Qt UI with the browser version of your app. Considering that "lite" browser-based versions of apps are a very common funnel to a more featureful desktop version, it makes sense to just use the UI tools that already work and provide a common experience everywhere.

The same search incidentally turned up that Qt requires a paid license for commercial projects, which is surprising to me and obviously makes it an even less attractive choice than Electron. Being less useful and costing more isn't a great combo.

[dmix]

I do frontend work so struggle to get over how bad most Qt GUIs are. They are far out of date compared to Gnome or MacOS in a lot of the small widget details and menus.

Plus I use Mac these days and Qt apps just never looked right on that platform.

At least web apps looks like web apps.

[prizzom]

As a recent toe-dipper into linux (now running Arch on a powerful minipc and KDE plasma) I'm shocked at how little progress has been made on the native UI side.

[KETHERCORTEX]

Well, it's not that surprising, considering that as soon as something radically new appears, there is always some mistreatment from all sides: platform owners, app developers and users.

Windows' Metro/Modern UI was pretty good from different perspectives, but didn't have enough effort put into it to make it a universal thing fit for multiple purposes (half of the Windows settings was still in Control Panel for quite some time), wasn't familiar for users (so they hated it) and wasn't familiar for developers (so they created hideous apps).

In the opposing Linux camp, GNOME made Gtk 4 with Libadwaita UI library with "everything is a phone app" mindset that not every app can adopt. For example, there's no application menu (a line with File, View, Edit, etc.) component shipped by default, you should make it yourself or get it somewhere. So now GIMP is developed using Gtk 3 (not modern 4) because it has all the components GIMP needs. Trying to get GNOME developers to implement some stuff outside of their vision is a futile effort.

[blackqueeriroh]

Please do continue to waste energy on doing something that will do nothing but allow you to feel superior about yourself. In fact, you will probably waste more energy than Electron ever has.

[3oil3]

I agree with you, I even think it's shameful. When I saw it was elctron, I sighted so long I almost choked. Can't even cmd+g nor shift+cmd+f to search, context menu has nothing. Can't even swipe, no gestures etc. ELctron is better than nothing, and I'm grateful, but it tastes bitter. As for performance, somebody if I remember correctly, once asked here "what's the point of 512GB RAM on the mac Studio?" And then someone replied "so you can run two electron apps".