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by thewebguyd
19 days ago
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> then somewhere GUIs suddenly got a lot worse Electron is the reason, and the elusive dream of "write once, run anywhere" that got us cross platform UIs that are bespoke and don't follow native OS conventions (or keyboard navigation), plus once marketing got involved and GUIs started needing to be branded instead of just fitting in with every other native app on that OS. |
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The "elusive dream" of 'write once, run anywhere' is realistically just people wanting to write software with direct product or service use in mind. Native OS conventions are subject to the middlemen of OS vendors, whereas the web (while basically subject to the same vendors) makes a substantial attempt at bridging the gap of writing software for your own purposes without native OS problems. This is a symptom of OSes catering/selling to developers as a platform and hooking them in the 1990s and 2000s.
This attitude that wanting to just make useful code for people and not worry about a windows 11 update breaking everything because they are irresponsible - to think that is not a valid desire is IMO a big problem.
On the other hand, you have a point that it quickly gets out of hand in terms of standards and accessibility and performance bottlenecks. WebAssembly and the WASI are so slow to come out and will by design always be slower than native performance. This doesn't and shouldn't stop us from having decently performant and decently usable program experiences, but it is a prerequisite to care about those things, and the other inheritors of the web development sphere clearly do not want to develop things properly if they take longer than the next fiscal quarter.
There is 100% good Electron code out there, just as 100% there is bad native OS code. The problem isn't inherently the goals of the 'write once, run anywhere' idea; it's more the casualty of other interests pulling away from what developers actually want.