Comment by e_proxus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by e_proxus | Hacker News Reader

I think what Electron brings to the table and what most other contemporary technologies fail at, is cross-platform functionality with minimal effort.

In contrast to most other non-constructive comments about how Electron sucks, I think the focis should either be how to improve Electron (as mentioned by others) or on how to improve the cross-platform story for more native technologies.

What makes Electron so attractive is that it is so very close to write once, run everywhere. No other technology today comes close, which I think is evident based on the number of Electron apps out there. There are some native languages which have great cross-platform stories (e.g. Go), but few of them seem have a great fronted story. Today the problem is that all major OS platforms are pushing their own framework and language walled gardens, but I think most developers would like their apps to be cross platform if they could. This is an example of where the community has to do it themselves because the major OS developers seem to have no interest in cross-platform tools.

What would it take to achieve something like Electron but native? Why hasn't it been done yet?

"minimal effort" - that's exactly the keyword here. It allows absolute minimal effort and laziness from developer at the expense of end user. Electron is a technology that favors developer user experience over end-user user experience. And you wonder why it is hated?

It's like shitty iOS cordova packaged web apps - they also require "minimum effort" and "cross-platform functionality". At the tiny expense of horrible user experience.

> What would it take to achieve something like Electron but native? Why hasn't it been done yet?

Are you really that ignorant? Never heard of Qt, SWT, GTK and myriad of other cross-platform tools and widgets used to develop cross-platform apps since the 80s?

It seems hated by some developers such as yourself, yet users of electron apps seem to quite like them, a lot. Not sure how slack's,spotify's, and visualcode's success indicate a horrible user experience. What Qt application has as much reach as slack? Every GTK app I've ever used outside of GNOME stuck out as out of place with the OS. Maybe some Qt apps flew under my nose but I'd say the same about them, at least to the extent that they always made it obvious via certain UI elements that they were Qt apps.

Blizzard's battle.net client is a qt app. I don't think it's available on linux though.

> I don't think it's available on linux though.

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...

Yes, feels strange to think that you need to run a qt app against wine because the publisher does not support gnu/linux.

But it is available on linux via `apt install wine` and downloading the exe.

"What Qt application has as much reach as slack?"

- KDE

- AMD's Radeon control panel

- VLC

- VirtualBox

Qt apps feel far more native than Electron apps in my opinion.

KDE: not at all comparable to Slack's reach. Not an app. Not even cross-platform?

AMD's Radeon: admittedly, I have not used this.

VLC: hardly any UI. Mostly menu items.

VirtualBox: hardly any UI. Mostly menu items.

Edit: formatting.

I've used the Radeon control panel. I also use the Slack and Spotify apps all the time with no complaints.

The Radeon interface does not fit in at all with Windows (nor macOS or any Linux DE I've ever seen, for that matter) and is almost always glitchy for me.

The Radeon control panel is worse than any electron app I have used, often glitching/freezing.

Slack and Spotify also have web applications that do essentially the same thing. I would be interested to know how many people download the Electron version but end up using the website more often, as this forces these apps to share the same runtime and puts some (meager) limits on CPU usage.

VS Code presents a good experience and it's resource usage is more reasonable, it's a good example of a successful Electron application. On the other hand, it has Microsoft behind it and there's probably good reasons why it's so much more performant than Atom, for instance. I am not convinced it's reasonable to expect all Electron applications to hit this relatively high bar in terms of quality.

In my opinion, Electron applications "stick out" as much as any other non-native application, this isn't an advantage to Electron. Indeed, I think Electron has proven that people aren't all that interested in a native application, as long as it's reasonably attractive and the interaction is fun. This could open the door for a new class of cross platform UI toolkit, one that drops the faux-native UI in favor of something simple, attractive and straightforward.

I think that React-Native or similar combined with a control kit based on, for example Material Design could work very well. I know there's some effort from the Xamarin guys at MS towards this end. I also think that React-Native itself could become a better option for more platform-friendly implementations.

Note that I don't prefer one technology over the other here, I just pointed out that this seems to be why people pick Electron.

I already know of the toolkits you mentioned, no need to call me ignorant. I have to admit I've never seen a single Qt, SWT, GTK app that looked and felt native. There probably are some but I would argue the effort is much higher than Electron.

Interestingly, I'm an end user of both Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code on a daily basis, and far prefer the user experience of the latter, Electron or no.

Man, do I hate comments like these. Drive me nuts. I'd comment with my real username but I'm on travels on a public terminal.

"Favors developer user experience over end-user experience"

So, something that favors end-user experience over developer experience will produce spanking fantastic apps?

"It's like shitty IOS cordova.."

Like shitty android/ios apps without the cross-platform functionality?

"Are you really ignorant?"

Holy crap! Most of us here know the stuff from the 80's! We also know the awesome stuff we can do with modern tech.

Your comment sucks of classic cargo cow bullshit. Loosen up.

In my opinion, the primary driver for Electron is the Javascript runtime. Lots of people have Javascript experience and Electron makes it easy to use that knowledge to bang out a desktop-like application. The write once, run anywhere angle is compelling as well but that's how web browsers and Javascript work; sure Electron gets to enjoy this but it's a function of this technology stack.

I disagree that the comments pointing out the high CPU and memory usage are non-constructive. These are real issues that literally limit the number of Electron apps that can run at a time on a particular machine. Some Electron apps perform reasonably well, VS Code is a good example. But many perform abysmally and Electron is treading dangerous ground by going against the trend of limiting resource usage in order to extend battery life. Indeed, in my experience running a handful of Electron apps is a sure way to shorten battery life.

I think that "Something like Electron but native" is a confusing idea. The browser engine that Electron uses is native to the OS it's running on... As others have pointed out, the best we could hope for is some sharing of the runtime that would allow more applications to run simultaneously.

You mention native languages that have a good cross platform story and I'd like to see some work toward a UI toolkit that is less demanding of resources. While people like Javascript, I do believe some of them will move to another language if they can do what they need to do: deploy to all OS environments with only minimal code changes. If Electron has taught us anything, it's that customer's don't really care that much about an application appearing to be "native".

I think you're right on many points, and I was more referring to the posts just complaining about it being in Electron at all as if Electron was some kind of bad word which should immediately trigger dismissal.

> I think that "Something like Electron but native" is a confusing idea. The browser engine that Electron uses is native to the OS it's running on...

Here I meant native as in a natively compiled language. The browser is also invisible in this case, and the whole Electron model adds so many layers (which is part of the resource usage problem).

> If Electron has taught us anything, it's that customer's don't really care that much about an application appearing to be "native".

In this case I meant native as in blending in with the desktop environment, which I think Electron apps are more successful at than other toolkits (which are often natively compiled).

I find the appearance of Electron applications pleasing, I am not trying to take a crack at Electron when I say this: I don't think they are particularly native looking and I think this is an advantage to Electron. The point I was trying to make is that I don't think "looking native" is all that important anymore. Web applications seem to have trained people away from that "I can only click on things that look like buttons" straight-jacket.

There's React Native, which has unofficial bindings for different desktop environments.

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