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Comment by twarge | Hacker News Reader

Downloaded the demo app for macOS; feels like an alien UI even though effort was clearly made to use system widgets. On the positive side, the app is only 4 MB and consumes 50 MB at runtime, so at least they've succeeded in that important aspect.

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If I'm not mistaken, this is just because the CSS styling isn't that good, right? Take Slack (which uses Electron) as an example: it looks almost the same on Windows and Mac, but it looks good — because the styling (through CSS) is good.

Is CSS really the major factor in the memory usage of an Electron app?

I wasn't responding to the memory usage portion of the GP's message, but rather to the alien feel.

You're talking about how the app looks, but GP was talking about how the app feels.

Slack looks nice but feels quite broken. For example, its non native context menus are beautiful, but do not dismiss properly, do not support single-click selection, do not support spacebar to pick, do not support type-select...

When I use Slack I am constantly frustrated that things don't work the way my other Mac apps work.

Slack definitely does not look good when your definition of "looks good" is "integrated with the rest of the OS"

Its consuming more than that at runtime I believe, you just don't see it because its using webkit in another process? I recall some discussion along those lines.

I think most companies that already decided on the electron UX vs dev effort tradeoff will happily trade user resources for a guaranteed, uniform browser version target. It makes a big difference in development and testing.

Yea, but as a user, it's disappointing, and kind of impossible for me to push back on this trend. I can avoid using these apps, but it's an impotent show of protest. It won't make a difference. User experience, native look and feel, and the user's RAM are all being sacrificed on the altar of More Comfortable Developer Experience.

Same here for Windows. Feels like using a video game UI. Probably is the basic styling, but I'm really liking the file size (2.6MB) and mem usage (app.exe using 2.7MB with the "Desktop App Web Viewer" instance using 22MB) otherwise.

The demo app has very basic styling, it isn't designed to be pretty. Since a Webview with HTML/CSS/JS is used for the GUI, you can style your app however you want.

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