"but it's a giant codebase that does things that would be simply impossible in Qt, GTK, Swing and others. "
Like what?
Like what?
It’s objectively orders of magnitude more complex than a messaging app. Heck, it used to have messaging built in at one point I remember!
Also, I’ve done a bit of Qt and while I don’t have an example (I’m sure someone else could supply one- finance back/front office?) it’s predominantly used with C++ which scales to millions of likes of code.
What year?
HTML snippets rendered for free (no need for an external HTML renderer)
Lots of little things like <video> being enough to embed a video into the view versus subclassing a C++ Qt class or whatever song and dance it is in other frameworks. It's productivity that's the killer feature. You can theoretically do everything Electron does in Java Swing, but it would require reimplementing most of the web platform.
Video - I drag and dropped video players onto UI forms 20+ years ago. <video> is a joke - you need something like video.js to make it functional in the real world and at that point, good luck on 'simplicity'. Adult sites have entire teams working on their video players, how messed up is that?
The problem today (old fart mode on) is that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And it seems that people don't even just only have a hammer, they don't even know what things that are not hammers look like.
Server-side rendering is a business need not a programming need. A company like Spotify may want to change the UI without updating the installation. To do this on the web platform is a well-supported pattern. To do this with Qt you'd have to implement your own HTML- or JSX-like framework on top of Qt (like Hyperview does for mobile).
Companies that use Electron can just move faster and crush competition. That's why there are billion dollar companies based on Electron programs and Qt people get excited about it being the software behind the radio volume button on the latest model fishing boat.
The topic is about general desktop GUI applications. Some users of desktop applications don't even have internet connection e.g for security considerations. Tell me more about changing application UI without internet connection.
I did that 20+ years ago too and no I didn't need an 'HTML- of JSX-like framework'. Again, when all you have is a hammer...
What are you going to do with the video? Coz that's where the problems with electron begin to appear. For example, you want some controls for seeking, displaying time, copying link, full screen, etc. And suddenly you get yourself a slow youtube-like monster. I really wish I could continue to use flash-based youtube, because I had no performance problems with it.
>HTML snippets rendered for free (no need for an external HTML renderer)
Slack doesn't need to render html snippets.