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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

You don't like Electron apps? OK, we know. We know because every single time anything about Electron is posted we have the same conversation why native is better, and it gets the same replies articulating the reasons why people still choose to develop with Electron anyway. As best I can tell absolutely nothing has changed in this respect.

Perhaps this thread could discuss the v9.0.0 release of Electron instead?

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Posts about incremental releases nearly always turn into generic threads about the project in general. I wrote a long thing about this recently, with the hope of being able to reuse it when the issue inevitably comes up again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071428.

^ Thank you for your service

not sure why downvoted, this is valid. while a valid criticism, in the context of the post it's a lengthier equivalent of "i hate X"

How about we talk about the memory consumption then

Native apps have UI elements that have tremendous research behind it by operating system vendors with deep pockets: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

Whereas, a UI framework such as Bulma is spun up by a bunch of people who are not as well funded: https://bulma.io/

Counterpoint: Google's Material Design framework has tremendous research behind it, and has a variety of both native and web implementations.

The broader point is the one I already made: this isn't new. None of this is. Going over the same points every time there's any post about Electron is pretty tiresome.

Problems do not stop being problems merely because you tire of hearing about them.

...when did I suggest they did? Come on. What I'm saying is that it is not possible to have a conversation about the release of version 9 of Electron on this site. So far the thread has proved me right.

The "electron is too slow" problem is really just a mask for the real "electron is eating into our desktop app market" problem. Or to put it another way FUD.

I assure you "Electron is slow" is not FUD. Electron is slow and has been measured to be slow many, many times. Perhaps "Electron is eating into our desktop app market" is a problem, but it is also possible that the real complaint is that "something slow is eating into the desktop app market".

The fact that an app built with electron may be fractions of a second slower than one built using native tech, does not change the fact that most of the people who keep on harping about this whenever electron is discussed are native app developers spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt about a competing tech stack. And it is a big threat because it makes creating desktop apps accessible to millions more developers, and therefore cheaper and faster from a business point of view. So what is essentially an economic problem pretending to be a technical one. I moved from Notepad++ (screaming fast) to VS Code, and those micro-second differences in speed do not matter at all.

Why do you think so? I think md os’sa lot of fundamental flaws, and is actually really bad for UX’

How is this relevant to the thread?

And despite all that, Apple's own apps (like Music.app) have very unintuitive UX easily beat by 3rd party developers. Native apps also are privacy nightmares and don't have uBlock nor a network tab. Let's not rehash this every damn time.

I agree, Music.app sucks so bad, it is horrendous.

Your complaints aren't relevant either, though: Music.app is terrible because it doesn't follow the guidelines, and Electron apps are no better than native apps from a privacy angle.

Yet MacOS didn't offer a dark mode until last year...

> Native apps have UI elements that have tremendous research behind it by operating system vendors with deep pockets

Yeah, and web UI design languages and the frameworks implementing them like Material Design and Fluent UI have neither research nor deep-pockets vendors behind them.

You can throw as much money as you want at a problem, but that won't save you from ending up with something like Windows 8 UWP apps.

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