In Defense of Electron | Hacker News Reader

In Defense of Electron

journal.standardnotes.org

8 pointsmobitar5 comments

Sure, wasteful RAM and CPU is a big problem with Electron, but bigger problems not addressed in the article include:

- Total disregard for the user interface experience of the host operating system, as native UI toolkits are often not used

- Since native UI toolkits are not used, knowledge that the user already has about using their computer and how user interface elements should behave becomes useless every time they download a new Electron app with a different "design"

- Electron app developers are rarely qualified to design good usable UI elements from scratch and are often really bad at it

- Complete lack of accessibility integration - don't even bother trying to use an Electron app with a screen reader or other assistive tech

Yes, Electron helps you to rapidly prototype and release something faster, and it might even lower the barrier to app development, but it also encourages JFDI mentality and somehow the poor end-users get forgotten about.

I've not seen many apps do more than one native UI well enough that the provider's own tech support didn't avoid supporting the 2nd, 3rd, etc, OSes.

Trying to go for least surprise starting from common web UI is really a better plan, though execution may be lacking.. I think if Mozilla didn't take a wrong turn at mobile OSes up instead of web apps down they might have steered things to a better UI level from a small but existent market share.

> Since native UI toolkits are not used, knowledge that the user already has about using their computer and how user interface elements should behave becomes useless every time they download a new Electron app with a different "design"

This is definitely not just a problem with Electron apps. I've seen a lot of OS X apps written using cross-platform toolkits rather than Cocoa, and every time it throws me for a bit of a loop.

> Electron app developers are rarely qualified to design good usable UI elements from scratch and are often really bad at it

See above. This isn't solely a problem with "Electron app developers"- more often it seems to be any developer trying to use a cross-platform toolkit.

> Complete lack of accessibility integration - don't even bother trying to use an Electron app with a screen reader or other assistive tech

Do you have any more details about this? I haven't looked much into a11y under Electron- does it prevent screen readers from detecting ARIA directives?

I like that the author decided to take a different approach to thinking about electron, but his argument that everything is fine for him on his macbook that has 16gb of ram seems rather weak. Many users may have more economic laptops that have a realistic 4 - 8 gb of ram. If he were to try using a dev machine with specs more along those lines, I would be more willing to agree with him.

Agreed.

I work with many schools, and you may be surprised how many workstations with 4gb of RAM are still out there. When I first started at this company I scoffed and considered them edge cases, but now I know better.

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