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by dzhiurgis 28 days ago
Browsers have been doing this well for over a decade and have tons of superiority.

My favourite that kinda settles this debate is - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48168058

2 comments

We know an exception doesn’t necessarily prove the rule. macOS has always had superior text rendering support since the NeXT days.

SwiftUI is immature but getting better. There have been tons of AppKit apps with excellent text support. Don't know what this guys problem is.

A native macOS app done correctly is superior to a web app in virtually every way. Claude Desktop won't be a best-in-class app if it remains a web app. Simple as that.

Browsers have been able to do this, but clear note: a single browser displaying many web pages in tabs.

Think of how most any modern computer would grind to a halt if every tab was its own full-fat web browser.

And THAT is the problem with Electron.

It’s not one installed framework providing the foundation for whatever number of apps you want to use, it’s a single electron framework for each and every app.

And that shit adds up, fast.

Electron isn’t like the JVM, which exists only once per computer and which can run dozens of different apps from a singular foundation. Electron is a completely self-contained system that will exist once for every app that is built on top of it. You have twelve Electron apps up and running, you have twelve obscenely bloated instances of Electron causing your computer to run out of physical RAM and thrashing the paging file to hell and back.

RAM doesn’t grow on trees. Prices are set to spike another 40-60% before the end of the year, above and beyond their already insane valuations. Anyone looking to use Electron in a greenfield project in this current environment is totally ignoring the current RAM crunch, and is spitting gratuitously in the faces of their users. And IMHO, doing so is moronic. There is no other way to spin that under current RAM conditions.

Writing on the wall is Apple needs to do something about it. Safari's Add to dock is decent start - I use it with Slack and Discord, but couldn't wait for Gemini and Anthropic to release their native apps (can't remember why). And of course once they did it was long wait for them to re-invent browser features.