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Comment by Philipp__ | Hacker News Reader

Native all the way! Opening github page of app and seeing that pink line instead of yellow (line that represents languages used in project) made me smile! I am really surprised they did native app, plus it looks really nice, I tought "sigh, another electron app", but to my surprise I was wrong! Good job for guys at Telegram, respect.

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Even the previous layout (which I personally preferred, but tastes…) still looked like a webapp more than native.. in a good way, never had any glitches and I really wonder how much it must have took them to make all the animations work so nicely. I loved toggling between chats and settings to see if it broke.. but never did!

> "sigh, another electron app"

Awesome Electron Apps

+ VS Code (Which was light years ahead of Atom but that gap has narrowed)

+ RStudio

+ Discord

Your point is? Emacs/Vim/Sublime are faster, more extensible and native compared to VS Code. RStudio I didn't use, nor I programmed in R, and I didn't know it was Electron app anyway.

I used VIM on my Amiga. Today I am mostly using VS Code on my 8 year old Dell at work. For coding there is no performance issues.

My Point: VS Code is a great electron application. Works great.

It is but it's slower than Vim. I've tried it. It is fast, for Electron app. Try opening huge text or log file in it.

> It is but it's slower than Vim.

VS Code < Vim < Vi < ed

I don't get the text editor speed as an issue ever. I used Vim (I use Vim mode in all my editors) not because it was faster on the CPU it was because it made my work faster. Today VS Code makes me work fast. I seriously have a 8 year old Dell crappy corporate computer for work and there is no noticeable slow down on either RStudio or VS Code.

No secret chats in Telegram Desktop means its primary selling point is lost.

I - and I guess many with me - don't trust the encryption at all.

I assume the crypto might be broken, NSA and FSB and aliens might be listening but I don't care.

My reasons to use it:

Desktop support is way better than Whatsapp.

More possibilities (bots, channels mostly).

And because I don't want to support Whatsapp by being part of the network effect that keeps people on that platform.

The reasons I use private chats sometimes is just to use autodelete to protect my conversations with my wife against my kids.

The encryption is often cited as its primary selling point here, but I don't think that's too representative. Certainly it isn't for me and most other Telegram users I know. I don't care much about that as I don't really trust any messaging app enough to send really confidential information through them.

For me, for example, he selling point is having an interface as slick as Whatsapp's, but not being tied to the phone, not having to necessarily give your phone number, sending whatever attachments you want, and getting a searchable log in the cloud.

Bots are also a popular feature with many users.

Telegram most certainly required me to enter mobile phone number. (Wouldn't even take a landline!)

I think they are referring to the username functionality that Telegram has — https://telegram.org/faq#q-what-are-usernames-how-do-i-get-o...

Sorry, I didn't express myself too clearly. I meant that you can add contacts without giving them your phone number. You do have to give Telegram your number.

You should try Wire [1] for multi-device sync and multi-OS use that has all chats encrypted end-to-end (like secret chats). It's not yet on par with the Telegram speed and UX, but it's quite good.

[1]: https://wire.com

I'm confused, how are there no secret chats? I use them all the time from Desktop.. but maybe you mean Windows? I don't recall trying them from Windows - i use the OSX version.

Secret chats on OSX has the same UX as secret chats on my Android client, fwiw.

You're probably using the Mac app. The post is about the Telegram Desktop cross-platform app, that doesn't support secret chats.

Weird, so i guess for OSX they have two desktop clients. Such ambiguous wording. Thanks

Whats wrong with Electron Apps?

Bloated, take too much RAM and don't use the OS features that I paid for.

Unfortunately, the cross platform UI alternatives are all terrible.

I don't consider Qt, wxWidgets, Swing, JavaFX, FireMonkey, <build your own layer> terrible.

For me it looks like web devs that don't want to learn native APIs.

In my experience building Qt apps for a major automotive manufacturer (and more recently, building a web app), the latter is much easier, even if you know C++ and Qt and have mediocre knowledge of web tech. If you don't know C++, then add 6-24 months to the Qt estimate, and expect it to have more bugs than an Appalachian motel.

How much QML in total application size did you use?

Our application largely predated QML, so none.

I'm not a fan because if I have 50 electron apps I have 50 builds of chromium/nodejs. This is bad because:

* Lot of wasted disk space.

* Each app loads a whole chromium/nodejs: lots of wasted RAM.

* The chromiums may not all be the latest. This could be bad if those have network exposure: https://sobersecurity.blogspot.mx/2017/01/looks-like-you-hav...

They're also bad platform citizens. Even in minor details - e.g. they don't exclude their browser cache dirs (which of course aren't in the OS cache dir!) from TimeMachine backups, so the incremental backups get clogged by random image caches. Accessibility is limited. Right click doesn't work. And more and more.

> Right click doesn't work. And more and more.

MacOS? I fail to see that this is the way it works in RStudio, VS Code and Atom???

It doesn't in Slack and some other Electron apps. You just get generic "copy" popup and bunch of functionality is awkwardly bunched into hidden click menus which make me think there's an issue with creating these menus.

https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/2232

Looks like it was addressed in 2015 but I don't think the other applications used the fix.

Have you ever taken a look at how much resources it consumes by comparison?

We would not have charge our phones every day and laptops would last for longer if anyone cared about how much their application consumes. It's ridiculous.

Good engineering isn't just about features.

I really wish they would port the amazing thin Mac UI to other platforms. It's everything I want in a minimal, yet modern and clean looking IM UX.

You mean Cocoa? It won't happen.

It's Qt by the way, and it's good on the three platforms.

This is the GitHub repo. https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop

Development has always looked a bit fishy to me, though. The main developer is anonymous (using the name/pic of a TV character), maybe it's even several people using the same profile.

That's probably Nikolai Durov.

> It's Qt by the way, and it's good on the three platforms.

I can't call "good" no accessibility support on macOS. But anyway Telegram Desktop is not the primary client for Macs, they have Cocoa-based alternative: https://macos.telegram.org/

I don't get it.

Why is native better than browser application? Browser application is by definition better sandboxed and can do much less damage to the system.

Normal application can do mayhem. And Telegram needs root access for installation... do I want to give it root access? When I can just open another tab?

Some users enjoy that software developers take advantage of the features of the OS they bought for a better UI/UX and performance.

Normal app can do mayhem just as any app can, even Electron one. I do not use Telegram, and do not know about root access, and it should be investigated. But root access is not always needed for native apps.

Why is it better? Hundreds of reason, you can see down below. I will try to sum it up why I like native over electron in 3 words: responsiveness, robustness, cleanliness. Electron on desktop is resource hog for me. It is good for people that don't mind that, and that are deep into JS ecosystem. I am not, and I always prefer native app, partly because I am on macOS and Cocoa looks beautiful.

Performance considerations.

Telegram at idle sits at 80mb ram and <0.01% cpu. Wire for example sits at 250mb idle and waffles between 0.05% and 2% cpu. Discord sits at 200mb idle and waffles between 0.01% and 0.10%, leaning towards the latter, jumping above it every few seconds at least.

Electron apps are still native apps and have the same security story. They just include a browser.

Oooh, people are comparing native and Electron apps. Then yeah, in that case native makes sense.

I thought they are talking about the chrome app version of telegram, which I am using right now.

And i don't get it, why kids today want only a browser. All that flame wars about the best window manager we fought and now we end up with one window only and a fucking tab bar?

Don't worry, they will invent tiling window managers inside a browser tab next.

Isn't Opera experimenting on that now? :)

Telegram Desktop doesn't need root access for installation. It's just a tar.xz file you can extract anywhere.

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