Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

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> You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is?

A single page web app?

That's all most of these are. Particularly the Slack/Hipchat/Discords of the world.

> People are excited about the Desktop again

If by desktop, you mean "need to be connected to mains power to run for more than 10 minutes", yeah, people are excited for desktops again.

Electron only really makes Javascript developers happy; they don't have to learn another language or framework to make "desktop" apps now. As a consumer, I fail to see the value in having to download large single page webapps that are equivalent (or worse) than their online counterparts.

Cross-platform applications like Chrome and Firefox and Steam and Doom and Factorio and... these have existed for years, and so have cross-platform programming languages and frameworks. Java, TCL, Qt, Flash... Electron is simply the lastest in a long line of cross platform frameworks, which is currently in-vogue with developers solely because it uses HTML and JavaScript.

>> As a consumer, I fail to see the value in having to download large single page webapps that are equivalent (or worse) than their online counterparts.

I use the Slack app for Windows, and the value for me is that it gets its own easily identifiable presence in my Windows task bar.

I have a (self-inflicted) problem with tab proliferation, and because I rely heavily on Slack, it's just way more convenient to use the self-contained version than to have it running in a tab buried in one of my browser windows.

It doesn't bother me at all that the Slack app is an over glorified web browser running the Slack web client.

IE10/11 let you pin any website to the taskbar with its own icon, complete with notification overlays: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg491738(v=vs.85).a...

Same for Chrome: http://www.geekpen.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Chrome-Mor...

Probably Firefox also has this.

I can confirm for Firefox. Right click the tab -> Pin Tab. It shows up as a symbol only (hides the title) leftmost tab and never goes away.

Here's more info, with images of how it looks like: https://support.mozilla.org/t5/Learn-the-Basics-get-started/...

> It doesn't bother me at all that the Slack app is an over glorified web browser running the Slack web client.

It kinda should, though, because if the browser component isn't up to date on the regular then it's possible you're looking at (what should be) a simple chat app with a potential RCE.

Discord isn't an Electron app, its React native. And as a frequent user on my Macbook and my Android, it isn't resource intensive at all.

Discord desktop is electron. Only our iOS app is react native. We spend quite a lot of time and effort optimizing performance however, something thats required given the number of large servers with many thousands of concurrent users.

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