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Comment by ogezi | Hacker News Reader

I completely agree with this. Electron drops the entry barrier for desktop development much like flash did for web development.

As computers get faster I think that the difference in performance of apps using electron versus platform native apps will be imperceptible.

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I would much rather see React Native succeed than Electron.

What we would rather see succeed really has nothing to do with what will ultimately succeed. In the end, every developer will choose what they want based on ease of use, their preferences, features, etc. The most elegant technology is not always the one that "wins" - it's the one that most people choose to use (for whatever reason) and contribute to.

I would much rather see a native to JS bridge completely decoupled from React.

The issue for me isn't performance as in speed but performance as in battery life. Chrome, and hence any electron app, by far uses the most energy on my laptop.

Maybe one part of the problem is conflating laptops with "desktop". Maybe I'm misguided since I don't use laptops for serious screen time and thus don't really care about power consumption at all, but it seems to me that perhaps laptops shouldn't be lumped in with desktops in this way as is now popular. Maybe we still have 3 major form-factor platforms[1], or perhaps even laptops should rather be lumped in with mobile, especially since we have 2-in-1 tablet/laptop hybrid devices.

[1]: Contrary to what Intel has been pushing with their lamentable "mobile-first" strategy.

> laptops shouldn't be lumped in with desktops

They are x86 systems that run the same operating systems as big desktop towers. Many people use laptops as their one and only x86 machine. Why would you not lump them in with desktops?

I thought that was rather clear. Because they (partially) run on batteries. After all, that seems to be the main problem people have with Electron in these HN threads.

> I don't use laptops for serious screen time

You're going to be more and more in the minority on this. Even though I prefer Chrome, on my MacBook I use Safari because I find it's battery usage to be significantly less.

I don't notice anything similar with VSCode, so its not Chrome/electron implicitly.

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