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Comment by ekiara | Hacker News Reader

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ekiara

Whats wrong with Electron Apps?

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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.

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.

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