As a long-time 1password shill I have hit my limit and will slowly start migrating to BitWarden and iCloud Keychain.
As a long-time 1password shill I have hit my limit and will slowly start migrating to BitWarden and iCloud Keychain.
Bitwarden's desktop app is built on Electron..
Our decision to built the macOS app in Electron was absolutely not driven by VC money. For the past few years, we've been working on consolidating 1Password's business logic into a single Rust-powered core that could be shared across all our apps. This has many advantages: feature consistency across platforms, faster development cycles, and better security. When building the front-end for the desktop platforms that would take advantage of this new core, Electron suited us perfectly, since we could write our UI code once and make it consistent across Linux, Windows, and Mac. We actually did build a native Mac app initially alongside the cross-platform Electron app, but we eventually decided that having two separate versions of the macOS app (one in Electron, one in SwiftUI) would cause a lot of needless development churn and hassle for both customers and our support team.
I can understand your frustration about Electron, but I hope you find my explanation reasonable. Please stop spreading misinformation.
I can absolutely attest to that with a relatively underpowered computer (4 gb of RAM). I can barely use 2 electron apps after which my computer grinds to a crawl (I’m running VSCode and Slack mostly). I have stopped using the discord desktop app and exclusively use the website now.
That AgileBits has been doing everything it can to force people to the subscription model and that this push to subscriptions very coincidentally lines up with two rounds of VC investment for over $300M over the past couple of years? No, that is not misinformation.
It may have been easier for the dev team to use Electron as their cross-platform toolkit, it is not easier for the users to put up with the attendant bloat and reduced performance.
The ones who should stop spreading misinformation regarding the forced subscription all seem to be working for AgileBits.
There's a reason people prefer one over the others. You can't have one front-end for all these different platforms. Well, you can, but then it's a compromise for at least 2 out of these 3 platforms.
Even Microsoft has "Office 365 for Mac".
That doesn't make the macOS experience better, it makes it worse.
You can create a shortcut in the iOS shortcuts app to open the Passwords area of Settings via an icon on your Home Screen. Just open the following URL in the shortcut:
prefs:root=PASSWORDS
Best tip I have for you around iCloud Keychain right there.
For anyone who doesnt use shortcuts often, what you need to do in Shortcuts is:
1. Make a ‘URL’ action to prefs:root=PASSWORDS 2. Hit the ‘+’ and make a ‘Open URL’ action from safari.
Save, add to Home Screen, and you’re done.
But that doesn’t make VS Code “shit”. It’s pretty much the shining star of Electron done right.
that is a very low bar. VS code is still slow and eats up a ton of resources. not to mention I don't trust anything from microsoft. OP said electron = bad and you should be ashamed of using it because its helping propagate it's usage when its a cancer.
Electron is a tool. It can be used well. It can be used poorly. Any tool shares the same issues. I can write a shit native app and I can write a shit Electron app.
All Electron does is lower the barrier of entry to making an app and making it work cross-platform.
VS Code is an example of Electron being "used well". I still find myself using other apps because they're more responsive. That tells me that Electron is inherently making the app experience worse, despite being used well
I understand the 'why' of electron, I am just not happy with the results at all.
Though maybe the world is better if that barrier of entry isn't lowered, I'm not sure what's better- a shitty app available everywhere or a good app available only on a couple of platforms...
Someone wants to build a 5 minute app for themselves and Electron happens to be the easiest way to do it? Go for it, there's nothing stopping them. If that app happens to be useful enough for others to use it, even better, that person just solved what could have potentially been a big deal for that user.
If the people using the app are content with the features/quality and the resources it uses, why does it matter so much, especially to a third party like armchair engineers on HN, if it was built natively, on Electron, or CrappierFrameworkThatWillEventuallyReplaceElectron?
If the app isn't usable by you (and this is a general you, not specifically directed at you), then the answer is simple: don't use it. Nobody is forcing you to use Electron or any app built with it if you don't want to.
If as a user your needs are not met, whether that's due to sluggishness from Electron, incompatibility from having a native-only solution, whathaveyou, then all you really have to do is wait. A competitor will come and take its place eventually; that's what the market is there for.
So far, it seems like VS Code is more than meeting its users' needs, but like I said above, other alternatives exist and will continue to exist, and they're all great if VS Code doesn't work for your particular use.
> If as a user your needs are not met, whether that's due to sluggishness from Electron, incompatibility from having a native-only solution, whathaveyou, then all you really have to do is wait. A competitor will come and take its place eventually; that's what the market is there for.
not the first time we've heard this argument used in different industries. I'm old enough to remember this argument about DLC's, DRMs and games being released before they are finished and get charged DLC packs to finish it. This argument falls apart when everyone starts doing it due to economic factors and complacent users/customers who blindly use what everyone else is using.
Businesses aren't stupid, if a decision were to actively lose them more customers than it'd gain, they wouldn't do it. If every single business and OSS alternative suddenly switched to Electron and you had no other choice, then maybe it's you that is wrong about the value of Electron.
But, of course, that's a ridiculous hypothetical not really grounded in reality. In the real world, plenty of alternatives exist for practically every Electron app out there so if you don't want to use it, you don't have to.
And for every one of you, there's hundreds of people that think their Electron apps are fine and appreciate that they can use the exact same interface regardless of which computer they're using.
i see you're moving the goal post
once you have a monopoly you can do whatever you want, thus why everyone keeps talking about EEE. look at what apple is doing now with photoscanning. What they are doing is inherently bad but they are able ignore everyone and go ahead with it because their "target audience" doesn't care about this kinda stuff. Doesn't mean the rest of us shouldn't actively fight against it. your argument basically boils down to let the market and customers decide for itself. Over here there are some of us trying to tell people to not support electron because of the potential consequences, and the downward trend of the web as we see it.
There's choice with password managers. But look at music. You have Deezer and Spotify. The only two free services that I'm aware of that only have Electron apps on desktop. (YT Music doesn't have an app on desktop). Spotify has exclusive content. You don't have choice when apps are the same as services. Hate the Hulu interface? You can't watch The Handmaid's Tale on Netflix. It's that kind of thing.
But now with Electron, which I don't like for the same reasons, as a friend once told me, allowed me to have some of my favorite apps running in Windows, Linux and Mac almost flawlessly with a good interface that finally the promise of Java was fully realized.
So while I would like people to follow more the Sublime Text approach, there is value in these Javascript based apps that lower the barrier of entry, provide widespread availability and are definitely easier to debug. Also sometimes I don't get to decide, since my org for instance makes it extremely convenient to stick with JetBrains stuff.
But hey, I'm the type of person that considered a Gentoo machine running Fluxbox far more useful than the very polished MacOS.