Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by emodendroket 20 days ago
You could argue that most users do not notice or care about this at all so it's a completely reasonable sacrifice to make to have rich applications.
3 comments

The bit that goes unsaid about Electron is... why?

If the goal is a legitimate app that has the lifecycle of an app that you start up and then shut down today the answer is "just write a web application" and then it "just works" on Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Android, Meta Quest, etc.

Mostly people get pissed about Electron because they have 15 Electron apps running in the tray burning up resources all the time and popping up stuff that covers the tray and other tray applications in those (very rare) cases that you want to interact with something in the tray.

It's a tray problem, not an Electron problem. That is, people use Electron specifically because they want to made rude applications which march all over your desktop in muddy boots: Electron is not a framework for writing well-behaved, polite, x-platform applications; you don't need that, you have the web! Electron is a framework for making rude applications that inhabit your tray, pop-up distracting notifications, etc.

> It's a tray problem, not an Electron problem.

The resource burn is an Electron problem. I member using HTML as "Active Desktop" in the Windows 98 era. You could drag an Internet Explorer widget into VB6 applications if you wanted (OLE, COM and ActiveX, damn that was an era of powerful technologies!). But it was one shared runtime across the OS which meant it did not have anywhere near close to the performance impact that even one Electron app has today.

Well, wanting to interact with the tray, plus access to native resources your browser can't access, I'd imagine.
People think they are upset about new technology, but what they are actually upset about is the general consensus being that the new technology has a better value prop.
Users don't have fucking choice in the matter.
I mean, not directly, but they demonstrate by not punishing heavy apps over and over again that they care much more about features.
Oh yeah I forgot the user is able to stop the force of will from trillion dollar corporations.
There are lots of examples of such corporations trying to sell a product people didn't want and losing their money.