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Comment by pspeter3 | Hacker News Reader

This seems like an ad hominem attack based on developers making trade offs. Electron essentially seems to be born out of the trade off of engineering a web product and satisfying customer demands for a desktop app.

Edit: Removed commentary about most desktop apps based on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14869864

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> reliable cross platform experience

In my own personal experience, these applications have almost never provided me with a more pleasant experience than eg a Qt application.

Plus I've had Slack's CSS mess up giving me a weird messed up UI. This has NEVER happened with an actually native application. I've also had Slack consume 4 gigs of RAM, which is ridiculous for something that is never the main thing I use my computer for.

Quicker time to market perhaps, but "reliable cross platform experience".. not in my opinion, at least, unless you mean that its reliably equally bad on all platforms ;-)

EDIT: Cross platform is easy when you don't need a platform-native look and feel, which web-as-native often doesn't do anyway (or not perfectly at least)

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Do you feel the same way about rich web apps?

Yeah, in comparison to native apps anyway. At least they don't pretend to be native. But really, I think it depends on use case: most web apps I use aren't things that I need to leave open all day, while Slack is.

Most? That sounds wrong to me, but I don't even know how you're counting.

Most by number of apps? Consider all little enterprise things built in Java or whatever.

Most by time spent? Browsers, AAA games and file managers aren't web apps, surely?

Most by HN hype and VC funding?

Fair. I was considering my own usage where I have very few desktop applications and tend to prefer web products. Apologies for the overstatement.

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