[x0x0]

> feeling that the convenience from ignoring the "deep expertise" and piling on hacks and lazy abstractions

But again, accidental complexity. The web platform is utterly rotten. So the people we should blame are chrome et al for not providing a standard lib or anything approaching a reasonable UI framework, which forces people to reimplement what a competent platform provides.

Electron is an artifact of the richest companies in the world prioritizing their platform monopolies and trying to increase their stranglehold on businesses by forcing them to write platform specific code, which is hysterically expensive to build and maintain. When I'm confronted with writing for web then reimplementing for mac and win... the answer is electron. I don't think anybody likes building in Electron; it's just it's that or +200% (or more) eng headcount to build 3 apps, one per platform.

[coldtea]

>Electron is an artifact of the richest companies in the world prioritizing their platform monopolies and trying to increase their stranglehold on businesses by forcing them to write platform specific code, which is hysterically expensive to build and maintain. When I'm confronted with writing for web then reimplementing for mac and win... the answer is electron.

And yet we could build native apps a plenty in the 90s and 2000s, with 1/100 the resources (tutorials, third party libs, native GUI frameworks, IDEs, etc) available, and 1/10th the target user base.

It's not about "platform specific code, being hysterically expensive to build and maintain". It was more expensive in the 1990s and 00s too, but people built it and maintained it just fine.

It's companies chosing convenience.

Especially since it's not poor programmers and small software shops going for Electron. It's the biggest multi-billion to trillion dollar companies.

Facebook uses this crap, Slack uses this crap, Adobe and Google use similar web-based UI crap (in what used to be native apps), and so on.

[cyberrock]

Building is not the same as maintaining and updating. As long as Apple wants to take a week to review every change and occasionally rejecting client versions (insert similar complaints about Microsoft, Google, Linux here), there will still be a case for these technologies.

[x0x0]

> native apps a plenty in the 90s and 2000s

And 1/100th the feature footprint.

[coldtea]

What? They had more features that we gave up, including native platform integration.

[jerhewet]

Microsoft Teams. The poster child for web-based UI crap.