[nok22kon]

people still want to believe that Electron apps won because "web developers are cheaper than real native developers"

they still dont understand Electron is vastly superior technology, and the fact that it might be cheaper is a side-bonus, not the main reason for its usage

BTW, what even is the "native GUI" of Windows that you are supposed to use if "you care about your users"? It seems not even Microsoft knows the answer to this question.

[naikrovek]

electron is better for the developer only. It is worse for everyone else, especially the users.

it is an insult when an application is delivered to me as an Electron application. "your time is less important than ours, ha ha."

sure, the developers might save some development time, but EVERY SINGLE USER loses time over a native application. Now multiply that loss by the number of users that you have. That magnification or amplification is called "an ecological disaster in terms of time wasted and electricity consumed."

[divan]

> still dont understand Electron is vastly superior technology

in what sense crossplatoform desktop-wrapper around typesetting engine is a 'vastly superior technology' to native UI frameworks?

[otabdeveloper4]

In the sense that typesetting and text is the rabbit hole that is 90% of UI effort. Native UI frameworks don't bother fixing the real hard problems, they focus on "widgets" instead.

(Not that the web stack is a good solution to this, but at least they're making an effort and they understand the difficult issues.)

[divan]

> Native UI frameworks don't bother fixing the real hard problems

I'm genuinely curious what do you mean by that.

My beef with web stack was exactly this - typesetting engine from 80s has been never designed for modern UI/UX needs, and it cannot adequately provide those. Whenever I interact with web apps, I experience so many glitches, weird interaction issues (especially if there is a zoom/selection/scrool involved), that I don't even pay attention to them anymore - it's a norm. It's a norm on web to 'just refresh page' (which is equivalent to 'restart native app') - we do it all the time, because absolute majority of web apps is just crap that requires extremely advanced team of web developers to make it a 'baseline' native-like experience level of quality.

[otabdeveloper4]

I mean if we wanted a good UI/UX framework we'd have to start from typesetting, not add it later as an afterthought to our button and text area widgets.

[divan]

> if we wanted a good UI/UX framework we'd have to start from typesetting

I think UI framework begins with a model of how composition, layout, rendering, input/focus and state works. Typesetting subsystem should be built on top of that.

And that's exactly the problem with this kind of post-rationalization of HTML legacy - it's a wonderful mechanism for what it was created for, but decades of attempts to add and repurpose all those missing foundational blocks for app development leads to the twenty layers of hacks on top of hacks.

[Skwid]

Well now I want an interactive LaTex UI framework in the style of NeWS

[sdfsdfs34dfsdf]

One is that it solves all problems once instead of various times in various levels of quality on various types of systems. Windows, GTK, Qt, FLTK, [100 others].. not to mention most "native UI framework" delegate to the underlying OS so they don't "solve" anything.

[divan]

Electron is not a novel approach or "technology" of achieving cross-platform UI. It's literally a Chromium browser plus a Node.js runtime, using web-stack to impersonate desktop application. None of these tools have been designed to solve UI pain points.

Closest thing to what you're describing is Flutter, which is a UI framework designed from ground up for modern UI app needs, without delegating much to OS level.

[goranmoomin]

> they still don't understand Electron is vastly superior technology

For the record, I'm one who loves the idea of Mac-assed Mac apps, I believe that the macOS ecosystem would have been much better if all macOS apps were written in AppKit instead of keep being rewritten into Electron. (See: 1Password, Raycast)

I hate Electron as much as the next person, and I hated Electron before hating Electron became a trendy thing to do. I loathe that Electron apps ship an entire Chromium instance for each app, and that it doesn't deduplicate. I am annoyed as hell that out of my 24GB of RAM that my MBA has, Slack, Linear, and Notion decided to each have a "Helper (Renderer)" process that uses 700MB of RAM each.

I do NOT think that Electron or the HTML/CSS/JS stack has an inherent advantage over other display technologies. I can list of at least 15 reasons on the spot on why it's inappropriate to use the web stack for desktop apps.

Yet, despite all of its flaws, people decided to commonly use it (with good reasons, the big one being cross-platform support!) as a display technology for desktop apps. And turns out that it works out okay-ish, they iterated on it and it improved a lot over the last 10 years, and at this point it's a pretty nice solution for the problem. And we already have a bunch of apps that run on it. Sometimes not the best tech wins, and that's okay.

My point was that despite all of the flaws, we developers as a whole decided to use web stuff for desktop apps, and it has properties that make it a good fit for some use cases that we have not solved yet, and we can use that to our advantage.

And if a lot of applications started to be written in the web stack, an OS could integrate an evergreen web browser as a first-class app runtime, and at least we might get less of the Chromium duplication that we currently have with Electron… at least I can dream. (Seems like Windows is going down this route.)

[sublinear]

> I do NOT think that Electron or the HTML/CSS/JS stack has an inherent advantage over other display technologies

If you want the real answer, it was all driven by responsive design and CSS. Qt tried to bring that to native apps and failed miserably. Modern devices need apps that work the same across any screen/window size, any aspect ratio, any resolution, support accessibility features, etc. The list of things you get out of the box with a webview is massive and only growing. Any attempt to clone this while ignoring W3C specs and browser quirks will fail.

I can't think of a more heroic and crazy uphill battle than managing to decouple CSS from HTML and JS, and get app devs to like it, and get users to like it.