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Comment by dstick | Hacker News Reader

> plus a couple of Electron apps

I’m afraid that might be your problem right there :(

I confirm. Embedded nodes each take a few hundreds of megabyte. It looked cool when we had 2 electron apps out there, now with so many of them good by ram.not mentioning apps developed in a few months rather than years, packed with features to become more memory hungry than the OS. MS Team is a particular offender.

Evergreen webviews baked into the OS are the next frontier of desktop app development. They can share a renderer and have much lower memory usage per app as a result - see the changes in Windows 11. Couple that with a lighter weight desktop compatibility shim to break out of the sandbox conditionally (like Tauri does in Rust) and this architecture can be totally fine. The issue isn’t the concept of using web technologies, it’s just the current implementation that was needed to make everything work on our existing platforms.

Mac will be a holdout because they heart native but hopefully will concede at some point because more and more people are going to deploy apps this way from here on out. It’s not worth it to employ native app developers for each platform except for the largest of the large companies.

>It’s not worth it to employ native app developers for each platform except for the largest of the large companies.

Programmers have ported Emacs to the native GUIs for MacOS, Windows and Linux (and 80% of respondents to a recent Emacs survey prefer to use one of those GUIs rather than Emacs's TTY interface), so "largest of the large companies" is going a little too far.

> Programmers have ported Emacs to the native GUIs for MacOS, Windows and Linux

That doesn't mean it would be commercially worthwhile to employ them to do so; volunteers do lots of things that wouldn't worthwhile to employ people to do. OTOH, wanting volunteers doesn't make it happen.

This will never be the same as Electron due to differences in the various rendering engines (e.g, Webkit2/WKWebView/WebView2 all have subtle differences), and this isn't accounting for version differences.

The reason people ship Electron is because Electron is literally the same thing wherever you shove it. You can search on this very forum for comments from the dev who migrated Slack from per-platform-WebViews to Electron.

That’s what I meant by evergreen webviews. I think you missed the point of what I was saying. There are not evergreen webviews cureently. They currently only update webviews on major OS releases. with windows 11 they will ship an evergreen webview for use by Teams and will abandon trident as well. it’s currently a react/electron app that will run in the OS webview on Windows instead of in Electron. This is precisely the reason MS is doing this. Slack was os-specific before evergreen webviews were a thing.

>I think you missed the point of what I was saying.

I don't believe I have, and I believe you're missing the point - much like everyone who says that platform-specific WebViews are the solution to Electron.

Go actually read the comments from the devs who migrated away from WKWebView. What you are describing will not solve what they sought to get away from.

Teams is a horrible abomination on so many levels. fragmented apps, auth, performance, it’s all a mess. Recently they took away the ability to do :emojis:

I believe it just exists to make people suffer

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