As someone who doesn't write GUIs often, I just don't want to have to worry about it at all. What's the cost of electron over webviews? 100mb hdd space? On the other side of the trade, never having to worry about cross platform concerns again? Not having to support or test on multiple platforms?
Seems like a no brainer to me. But it's entirely possible, even likely, that I'm putting too much faith in electron, or that there are better options I just don't know about.
I really hate electron apps, for example you have teams, that is written in electron, in linux is somehow better than the web version but is just way worse than the windows/mac versions, in web you can view 2 cams, linux 4 but in mac and windows you have more cams at the same time and also a lot of features that are missing in linux, so I don’t see too much the benefits of electron here, just pure laziness of microsoft not willing to invest in a better cross platform app.
Efficient software is great, the cool parts of the projects I work on are efficient. In my case, the GUI doesn't need to scale in the same way, and I'm pretty confident the customer would rather have better cross platform support (at a lower cost than if we had to test a bunch of OS web views) than 100MB of their disk back.
But yeah, there are plenty of examples of software I use where I disagree. Although this is often based on my aesthetic dislike for an inelegant system, than on any kind of resource constraint.
And in doing so you're prioritizing your needs over all of your users'. I think it's fair to claim that a minor convenience to you, at the cost of inconvenience to all your users, might be something you may want to deal with.
I would prefer to live in a world where I didn't believe the last sentence to be true, but in the current world I still think it is :)
In my experience, unfortunately it isn't true that apps work with very high reliability. This is why I use multiple browsers. I don't want to use Chrome, and I encounter new websites with functionality that don't work properly in Safari or Firefox quite regularly. Some of this is even quite basic functionality.
From things like shopping carts where the final payment button doesn't work in Firefox (nothing happens), to video conferencing that sort-of works in Safari but then the audio breaks while it is reliable in Chrome.
Even GitHub doesn't render properly in Safari occasionally (the page is full of weird size text and giant rectangles). But that's almost certainly a Safari bug.
I like development in Firefox too. When I was doing it intensively (just ~2 years ago), I found some of the CSS I was using behaved differently between Gecko, WebKit and Blink, though (and differently again in Android's pre-chrome browser), so I reconfirmed that I do need to test some things across all browsers. By differently, I don't mean prefixed browser-specific CSS (although there is that), I mean standardish things like table row height calculations showed up significantly differently, certain border highlights, and a number of WebKit rendering bugs that Gecko did not have. Key-event based text editing and wheel events are also significantly different, even more so when you include the common mobile browsers.
Given the megabytes of JavaScript on many websites, the chances that some of it depends on some random VM internal quirk is quite high.
There were problems with internal off the shelf applications whose user interface was built for IE6 only. The funny thing is those applications still worked well with the Firefox of the time, but IE9 broke compatibility with them and the applications didn't work on IE9, but IE10 got released and was compatible with them again.