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Comment by eatonphil | Hacker News Reader

> After all, people have been predicting that web-based tech will be the next big thing on desktop for as long as I’ve been writing this blog — i.e. eons. And yet it never quite happens. Electron apps, for instance, are, like Flutter, popular with web devs but desktop users? Well, they’re less keen.

Lost me here. I don't think most users care whether their apps run Electron or .NET or Python/QT or whatever so long as the app works. Stigma as a dev makes me want to avoid Electron apps but that's because I'm a dev.

If the point is about desktop apps vs. apps that actually run in the browser (e.g. Sketch vs. Figma) then that's a real debate. But that has nothing to do with Electron.

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Electron apps use more CPU and drain the battery faster on my Linux laptop. Users may not care what framework renders their apps, but if they were running more than one or two electron instances they may start to notice their battery life is awful. It’s worse on Linux already, there’s no reason to make it even worse.

Faster than? Do you compare applications that do similar things?

Other text editors. Other chat apps. Other music players. The same apps before Electron.

Take a look at desktop Telegram when you have some time. It bundles its own fork of Qt (which inflates its shared memory usage as nobody else is using the library), has a very polished UI and all the same features as any other modern messenger, and runs circles around any Electron application I've ever seen. On my machine from 2014 it starts instantly and the memory usage never goes above 200-250 MBs, which is not ideal, but still is ~4 times less than the _startup_ memory usage of an Electron application.

I just started VSCode on my desktop. Its "_startup_ memory", with something like two dozen extensions installed, is sitting at 170MB. I also just started Discord on my desktop. Its "_startup_ memory" is 39MB.

Now Slack's a pig at 380MB, fresh-opened, sure. But reality doesn't really seem to oblige these kinds of claims in 2021.

Are you looking at a single worker process out of about 10? This is such a frequent mistake it's not even funny. Do something resembling a proper measurement: run `free -m` (or the alternative on your OS) before starting VSCode, and then right after it finishes loading, ideally on a completely bare system to reduce noise.

Here are my numbers for a freshly installed 1.53.2 with zero plugins and no configuration:

  used
  2882

  used
  3404

OK, it's "only" 522 MBs for a bare-bones text editor which requires "two dozen plugins" to make somewhat usable.

I wish there was a stickied post feature to head off these sorts of RSS measuring contests.

Multiprocess applications, and especially multiprocess applications with really big discardable caches, are extremely difficult to compare apples-to-apples.

I'm on Windows at the moment and, yes, I'm looking at the whole application's memory usage. Even with half a dozen tabs open, right now, it's sitting at 250MB combined. (Which--well, I've got 64GB, I shall benevolently allow it.)

Discord has jumped up to about 300MB with a bunch of use, though 50MB (?!) of that is the Discord updater, which is pretty wild.

Thanks for the numbers, thats indeed quite a difference.

I think what is meant is that while some electron apps are popular in the developer demographic (i.e. VS Code) the average desktop user does not run many of then, and is more likely to use desktop apps written in non-web technologies (VLC, Transmission, Office, and whatever it is people use these days)

As far as I know Discord, Skype, and Slack are all electron based. Office is mostly used online.

Electron is a really easy way to add Linux support to your app.

Slack, Spotify, Signal and Whatsapp desktop, Skype, Discord, MS Teams are all built on web tech. I think even Office 365 nowadays has a lot of the UI stuff written in react native.

A lot of older linux software is non-web based but that's not the average desktop user.

> I think even Office 365 nowadays has a lot of the UI stuff written in react native.

Where can I read about this?

I think I read about this on twitter from one of the webpack devs a few years ago, might have been this chain. (https://twitter.com/TheLarkInn/status/1006746626617008128)

I think for react native in windows apps more generally the github page is a good start

https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-windows

Yes. I use VS Code and it works really well for me. The fact that it’s an Electron app is of no concern to me.

RStudio is also web-based tech — which enables it to run in a browser when remotely hosted.

And these are some of the most widely used IDEs out there (IDEs are also a class of desktop apps that have an above average UI complexity). I don’t think a majority of users are “less keen” just because they’re web based tech.

Maybe the only nitpick I would have is the odd web debug menu that would pop up on occasion when one right clicks on certain UI widgets.

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