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Comment by mastrsushi | Hacker News Reader

There’s nothing wrong with the industry wanting to switch to layout engines for desktop applications.

The problem is that this type of runtime environment is still fairly new. Desktop OS’s should have HTML/JS runtime built into the application layer, maybe even deeper. It’s such a dominant user functionality these days.

Instead we get a bunch of headless chrome instances. There needs to be an engine that maybe isn’t as performant as Electron, but is much smaller in memory and can handle these apps like Discord.

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I don't even care about the memory footprint personally. I can buy more RAM. It's that every Electron app makes up all of it's own navigation paradigms, doesn't integrate well into the OS, and always feels slow.

I find this pretty funny.

In the 00s and early 10s, the Linux desktop was criticized because of the inconsistency in the look and feel, e.g. using Firefox (GTK) in KDE (Qt) plus random apps in Motif, TK, or straight up Swing. The consistency of Windows and OS X desktops was desired and looked for: people migrated themes across toolkits, synchronized font settings, etc.

Now every Electron app does their own thing and people don't seem to care one bit, but when I need to use one of them I feel like I'm using a different CSS-enhanced, antialias-enabled 90s Winamp skin for each app.

People got used to having every UI be its own special snowflake thanks to 20+ years of web. Consistency is now more of a niche demand.

Ironically, look and feel consistency on Linux is now excellent. Most things are written in GTK or Qt, and it's not hard to get them looking identical. It's even possible to run a system that uses entirely Qt apps on top of KDE, which gets you Win95 levels of consistency.

yes, this sort of objection is always fake

It's not fake, it's just that it's been drowned out by a wave of people who are indifferent or ignorant.

Or have simply learned helplessness. Developers actually listening to users is so 90s.

Chrome is not memory-hungry. Webapps are.

I didn’t think of it that way, It’s probably a tug war

Chrome has stellar engineering work done on it. It'd bet it's in the top 10 of the most optimized pieces of software ever. It's because of this work that modern web applications are even possible.

The consequence - perhaps unintended - is that the web application practices all settled around extremely wasteful but "fast enough" patterns. It takes extra work and going against the grain to make web applications performant, and rarely anyone bothers.

In my experience what you're describing is true. JIRA Scrum is abused by businesses to implicitly blackmail teams into delivering ASAP, that means shortcuts and dependencies to "get shit done". All else is secondary. Tech debt? Put it in the backlog. "Good enough" is king. Every fault attributed to "stupid web devs" is just a projection to mask the true anxiety that the market has deemed expert, artisanal engineering irrelevant to profit and success. A comment above was lauding a fork of an open source electron app for implementing a C++ backend: good luck convincing a business to do that. Microsoft probably does this for VS Code precisely because their demographic are people who profess sensitivity to these types of details, but the broader population is not.

> Desktop OS’s should have HTML/JS runtime built into the application layer, maybe even deeper. It’s such a dominant user functionality these days.

They all do but good luck convincing any developer to develop something they have to test in multiple places with different engines when they can just only test in chrome and ship a bloated executable and the problem is negated.

> good luck convincing any developer to develop something they have to test in multiple places with different engines

Ooh, this is such a good point! I am one such developer.

I love building UIs with HTML and I am ok with building JavaScript.

BUT this would not be the solution. People would still run different html and js engines and everything would be a mess. Not to mention the js ecosystem with its dependency creeps isn't known to be efficient. There have been and are plenty of other multi platform languages that have less platform issues. Like: Java or Haxe.

That said I am pretty sure gnome shell comes with a complete js API.

yea but chromium has been ported to everything so your app will work exactly the same on any device chromium runs, that's the issue with writing native apps.. you then have to port it to all the devices and update on OS changes.

Qt works in more places than chromium and is much more native - it's even the native platform for multiple OSes

Case in point: Qt works on Haiku, Chrome doesn't.

Qt also since recently started working on Serenity :)

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