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> why can't we talk about it if it is substantiated?

Because we don't need every bit of news about Electron to turn into a thread of people saying, yet again, "I don't like them compared to native apps".

We know already, and it's not relevant to the article. If the article was opinion or research on the differences between Electron and native apps, or suitability of Electron for certain use cases, etc., then your complaint would be relevant.

But your comment is not relevant - it has almost nothing to do with the contents of the article.

Yes we do. Maybe if we annoy Electron devs (and their fans) enough the framework will get its act together

This. I almost didn't click to read the comments simply because I knew that it would be the same old religious argument. I hoped I was wrong, but wasn't.

Any half-decent dev is aware that VSCode would be slightly better if it was a native app. Any half-decent dev is also aware that doing so with cross-platform support would be a humongous PITA.

You're right about the relevancy. Nothing to do with the 9.0 release. I had an itch that I asked and now its blowing up. I can't delete my comment now.

The biggest magnet for this phenomenon on Hacker News is Amazon. Every Amazon article will undoubtedly have at least one comment complaining about counterfeits.

It'll show up everywhere. Apple articles will get something about MacBook keyboards (perhaps a bit less now that they've "fixed" it), Microsoft doing anything with open source will get "EEE", Google will be "Google needs better support", Facebook is "why would you ever use this privacy-violating democracy-destroying nightmare". I haven't even gotten into non-company topics yet.

I think that the problem it's not the "Electron lovers/haters", the problem it's that the post it's above the 9th release, you expect to see discussion regarding the release, not above that non-native apps feels round or sharp, that's matter of preference, and everyone here knows about the resource hungry of Electron

VS Code looks/behaves quite "native" to me...You can have success if you choose Electron. Many projects proved. The tech doesn't seem that important. Now go build something great and people won't unpack it to see if it's electron or native. As always the execution is more important(and the project/idea itself).

Meh - I used IntelliJ IDEA, Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code on a daily basis and VSCode is the most responsive environment by far - both in terms of UI responsiveness and operation speed. Now you can argue it's not as fully featured as the mentioned IDEs but it's obviously not just about native vs electron, and electron can provide a good enough experience.

Is JetBrain stack native? I don't think it is.

Java/Kotlin mix, I believe

That's another thing, Java apps just feel heavy. Like its got a couple of kilos of lead attached to it. Ever used Eclipse IDE? Holycrap.

Also, Eclipse and Jet Brains software feel more similar to each other and now that you mentioned Java, that makes sense.

Have you actually ever used IntelliJ? It doesn't feel "heavy" compared to say Visual Studio (the real one, not Code).

I haven't used IntelliJ per se but I've used CLion which is similar sofware from Jet Brains. To me, both feel super heavy.

They’ve piled everything on the UI thread like a freshman, now they are paying the price.

It's not similar, it's the exact same code, just with features turned off. If I open a C project in IntelliJ it's literally the CLion plug-in.

VS on small projects feels pretty light. It's only on the larger projects and maybe Resharper in the mix that it becomes difficult

I have used IntelliJ for years. I have found nothing I prefer to it. It is absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, heavier than depleted uranium.

No, it's based on Java's Swing.

Visual Studio is, JetBrains is JVM - but still closer to native than DOM.

How is Swing closer to native than DOM?

For one, Swing isn't build on top of technologies that specialize in displaying interactive documents

Intuitively it it feels like that should make swing faster, but experientially swing feels heavy and slow.

Is swing poorly optimized, is it due to being in Java?

I'm not a UI dev and have not thought about it much.

I'd agree that Swing feels heavy... but Electron feels an order of magnitude heavier.

Though, when done right, it feels fairly close to native. I earn my pay working with IDEA and if you turn off the plugins you don't need its actually quite snappy where you would reasonably expect it to be. I would bet it takes far less optimization to get there than an equivalent Electron application

You aren't sandboxed - you can reach out to native API/code if you hit some limits, you have threads, etc.

Your anecdotes seem to be directly contradicted by hard data. IDEA with zero latency typing[1] has an order of magnitude lower latency than vscode[2]

[1] https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

[2] https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/27378

Latency of the typing is not the same thing as general UI responsiveness.

The performance I'm talking about is stuff like code analysis chugging and stalling the editor so I don't understand how your link is contradicting anything from my post.

Lint/hints taking forever to update after code editing, autocomplete popup takes a second to show, etc. This depends on codebase naturally but in my experience for the cases where VS Code works well (mostly typescript) on the same codebase and same PC it's much more responsive than IDEA tools or Visual Studio (and I'm running this on a i9 MBP with 32GB ram so not a weak HW thing).

I type on a 60hz monitor and I'm not particularly sensitive to that kind of latency (this is where I consider VS Code good enough)

That is like comparing cars based on the latency of the door unlock button.

I mean sure, faster is better, but door unlock speed is probably not the problem that makes people think a car is “slow”.

The zero latency sounds cool, but there are other issues with the IDE on OSX. There is issue [1] how the UI is repainted on any interaction with the IDE [2]

[1] - https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-526

[2] - https://photos.app.goo.gl/UmZ8GiVmrGYBbzyV9

Definitely VS code feels so much more responsive than IntelliJ.

If the feature becomes on par with IntelliJ, everyone would jump ship. But not today.

Matching native UI with non-native toolkits is extremely difficult. But the success of so many electron apps suggests that in many cases this doesn't matter that much.

I don't know - success of x and some property of x can be orthogonal. It probably is orthogonal in the case of electron apps. The main reason for their popularity is because they are easy to develop in cross-platform way. Doesn't mean that "x property doesn't matter".

Users choose to use them anyway. So obviously being platform native matters less than other considerations.

I think it’s because the DOM just isn’t as responsive as native components - interacting with anything in a browser or in an electron app has that subtle latency that doesn’t make it feel as good. Seems that this could go away with react native desktop.

Not only is not as responsive, but it doesn't respond "correctly" either.

> Does anyone else experience the same?

The first time I experienced such a feeling was when Visual Studio .NET came out. Compared to the previous version, Visual Studio 6, the dialogs and wizards in VS.NET gave me a "web-like" feeling. I guess it was one of the first attemps to use the web technologies to make a desktop app. Along with the Active Desktop feature, they were truly ahead of time.

However, that doesn't mean I loved them. VS.NET was slow as hell and I believe it was one of the reasons why VS6 lasted for so long.

> but by the way an Electron app behaves that it's not a native app. It has got that "browser"-like feel to it.

Aren't browsers native apps? Edit: Chrome on windows is just as native an app as MS Word on windows, so that "feel" may have nothing to do with the tech it was built on, but a native vs browser mindset that even blinds you to the fact that all mainstream browsers are actually very native apps, regardless of the "feeling" they give you.

Yup. I'm just shocked that https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/76594#issuecommen... has been open for more than year now. Two finger scroll that lags for up to 1 second! Imagine the uproar if Apple introduced this bug into XCode and then ignored the ticket for an entire year.

Are you under the impression that Apple diligently replies to bug reports or that XCode is not buggy?

I don't know, for example for me VSCode feels 1000x faster than Photoshop, which is a native app. Photoshop takes a long time to open, breaks the "Windows" keyboard shorcut, is basically slow in general. VSCode has a fast start-up time and everything in it feels responsive. I see a lot of comments from Apple users, maybe Electron works better on Windows than on Mac for some reason?

Photoshop has miles more functionality, and typically deals with much bigger data.

VS Code is also not an outlier for Electron apps, as most of them are a lot jankier, IMO.

Meant to say VS Code _is_ an outlier, sorry

The reason you see a lot of comments from Apple users is because the system has had a consistent paradigm for desktop applications, designed by the party making the operating system, for years, which means that they have come to rely on and become used to such software. The fact that Electron breaks all of those expectations and is a horrendous resource hog to boot is an unwelcome development if you've been used to high-quality native applications for all this time.

Except Apple's design system has taken a backseat in the post-Jobs iPhone cash grab era, and becomes less and less consistent with every release.

And we're saying that people who use Catalina are expecting a gold-standard, performant experience? Do we use the same Catalina? Because it represents a major regression in the macOS line.

Maybe we're long overdue for a paradigm shift.

For whatever it’s worth, the macOS messages app uses an embedded webview to render the message threads.

Also FWIW, Messages.app is poorly maintained almost certainly next in line to be converted to Catalyst. (Web views are used in other parts of the OS as well; all the "services" panes for example, as well as Safari's web inspector.)

Didn't Slack rewrite their app to be native and move off of Electron?

> Didn't Slack rewrite their app to be native and move off of Electron?

What are you talking about? That has never happened.

They posted this blog post [1] on July 22, 2019 and you probably misunderstood their point.

They did not rewrite the application to build on native libraries, they simply redesigned the architecture of their UI logic to draw web components only when strictly necessary, sharing states between workspaces and stuff like that, but it is —as of today May 19, 2020— still 100% a web application running on top of Electron. They recently announced another visual rewrite [2] on March 18, 2020 which also resulted in the same web application running on top of Electron, no changes in that part whatsoever.

[1] https://slack.engineering/rebuilding-slack-on-the-desktop-30...

[2] https://slackhq.com/simpler-more-organized-slack

Its quite simple. Most electron app suse HTML stuff that is really really hard to make in native windows app and most not put time and effort in it.