Comment by jyrkesh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jyrkesh | Hacker News Reader

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> If you're building a substantial app then the fact that Electron apps require more memory is usually not a problem.

Gonna need a citation on that. Every tab of Gmail I have open takes up more RAM than my fully-featured Outlook desktop app that's pushing an order of magnitude more items through Exchange.

Slack, Discord, and Teams are loads more heavyweight than all the fanciest (non-Electron) IRC clients. Or look at Telegram: wicked fast native client that's barely using more than 100 MBs on my box with 20 some odd group chats all pushing instant multimedia notifications every couple mins.

Not to mention all the Electron counterparts are just slower. I actually don't know what black magic Microsoft did to make VS Code so snappy (it's way more responsive than all those chat apps I listed above), but it's also still noticeably laggier than Sublime and true Vim.

There are all these clients out there now that use far more memory then native alternatives and objectively perform far worse but they are all insanely popular and dwarf the alternatives in terms of user base.

So I mean, "it's usually not a problem" is true, resource consumption of the clients don't appear to affect acquisition of users or popularity of the platform.

Not a problem for one metric, sure. Certainly a problem in others. Let's not imagine that because one thing is a success, all its other failures must be ignored.

That ignores the fact that those apps may have done even better had they invested in native alternatives.

I don't think it's a stretch to assume that there's some non-zero set of folks out there that tried to switch from Exchange/Outlook to Slack at scale and said "this doesn't really meet our needs". Some of that is UX, sure, but that UX was also driven by the limitations of performance.

How big is that non-zero set? Who's to say, business is hard and full of imperfect assumptions. But I can tell you as a user of most of these apps, having them not do what I tell them to do because of laggy UIs is infuriating. (E.g. I constantly make the mistake of "reacting" to someone else's message in Teams while I'm trying to find a permalink or edit my own message. Then they get a push notification, I erase the reaction, and I hope they assume it was a mistake. Happens every couple days.)

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