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Comment by bluetidepro | Hacker News Reader

I always get a chuckle at all the hate Electron gets on HN, or in very technical communities. At the end of the day, so many people fail to realize the success of Electron is in making desktop applications so much more approachable for those that are mainly front-end focused developers/hackers.

I have played around with Electron in the past for fun "nothing" projects, and also tried to understand what many on HN would want as the "correct" way to build native apps. It's an indescribable difference how much easier Electron is to get up and running from my experience, as someone who primarily does front-end work.

Are there better ways to build native apps? Of course. Electron still solves a massive problem for many developers and end-users that I don't understand why so many here get on their high horse refusing to acknowledge. It's similar to PHP hate to me. Of course there are better languages to use, but things like WordPress using PHP are so much more approachable for so many developers.

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I believe this community fully understands everything in your post, and believes Electron is a bad decision anyways. Why? Because when we're talking about these things, we're *users*. As a user, I don't care how easy it was for a developer to write the software. I care that it respects common UI conventions. I care that it's secure. I care that it doesn't use unnecessary resources. I care that it integrates well with the rest of my operating system. I care that it supports i18n and accessibility controls.

Electron is approachable because it eschews all of these things in favor of convenience to the developer, but these things are important to the user, and the user is who we should care about. We write software to serve users. We need to be asking ourselves if the benefit of the barrier to entry on producing applications be so low as to give up all the benefits of more traditional ways of application development (I'd argue no) and whether it's worth trying to bridge the approachability divide with easier APIs for developers and making the development experience as user friendly as possible (I'd argue yes).

> As a user, I don't care how easy it was for a developer to write the software

Most users only care about features which is directly connected to speed of software development.

You are speaking for all users but I'm certain that things you are saying are not true for example, users don't care if an app uses "unnecessary resources" unless it's fast enough. Users definitely do not care about UI conventions, most probably don't even know there are conventions. As for security, if you are using anything written in C or C++ you already lost there.

I think it is already about such basic, intuitive things like the order of buttons, is it [OK][Cancel] or [Cancel][OK]?

Will pressing Alt+F4 close the entire window? (See MS Teams, if you open the settings dialog and and to close it).

You can find probably dozens of such examples

> Most users only care about features which is directly connected to speed of software development.

Considering that the average user refuses to wait longer than 2 seconds for a webpage to load, it's clear that people do care about more than just features. To dismiss that reality seems like a very "let them eat cake" attitude to take. Users care very much when an application makes their computer run sluggishly, and despite your disbelief, users actually do notice when an application looks different from their other applications, and they may or may not care about that. You say that users don't even know that there are UI conventions, but let me ask you this: if you created an application on a mac and moved the three buttons to close/minimize/maximize the application window from the upper left to the lower right, what percentage of users do you think would notice that UI convention change? I'm willing to bet about 100% of them. UI conventions are more than just a pretty facade, they provide hints about functionality using symbols and patterns that we've grown accustomed to, and don't even think about consciously. As for security, it's never a good look to point out how bad one thing is to justify another thing being bad also. Just because we've already lost doesn't mean we should give up.

> As a user, I don't care how easy it was for a developer to write the software.

Users care transitively since there is a correlation between the amount of effort it takes to write a piece of software and the price required to sustain the development of said software. In my experience, many users care more about price than consistency or speed.

In cases where users are willing to pay more (such as with some professional software) you'll often find a lot more native applications.

> I care that it doesn't use unnecessary resources.

I have never heard a non nerd say anything like that.

Funnily enough programmers care about resource usage yes. Why would the user care, it's not their job? You're glad that the person who engineers your car cares about resource usage I'm sure!

> You're glad that the person who engineers your car cares about resource usage I'm sure!

Is that necessarily true? Fuel economy is only where it is because of government regulation.

I think it's partly true at least yep. At least in the mind of any engineer worth their salt. Any problem is solved with tradeoffs though, eg. no regulatatory compulsion to achieve some mandated benchmark might lead to less of a focus on optimising something to cut costs. It's not a really a zero sum thing and is very context dependent I'd imagine.

People who aren't "nerds" don't know whether an application is using unnecessary resources. They just think their computer is slow and they need a new one.

You’ve never heard a non-nerd complain that their computer is sluggish or unresponsive? Or that they can’t figure out how to do something because the way they’ve always done it no longer works on some new app?

As a user I care about having the features I want, working the way they're supposed to. And, as someone who uses all of Windows, macOS, and Linux in a typical day, I want these features to work consistently across platforms. There is really nothing worse than a "cross platform" application that fucks you when you try to move back and forth, and the Electron applications I've used consistently do better at this than anything else. If Electron itself is the reason these teams are able to focus on features and let compatibility "just work" for the most part, that is IMO a huge point in its favor.

More broadly, I think the popularity of Electron apps is evidence that users are actually very happy with them. There's an argument to be made that modern software is in general bad for users, but plenty of Electron applications (e.g. vscode, Obsidian) are IMO relatively unimpeachable in terms of offering real useful functionality with a minimum of dark patterns and/or other sketchy practices.

Using all of Windows, macOS, and Linux in a typical day makes you an extreme outlier.

Widely used doesn't mean popular. Teams for example. Many widely used Electron apps are chosen by employers. Or are free and have network effects. Or became dominant as native apps and have a moat.

Arq went back to native because users hated the Electron version. Slack users who see Ripcord say the company should hire the developer. I almost never hear anything positive about the Spotify app.

Do you claim Electron apps have fewer sketchy practices?

> Using all of Windows, macOS, and Linux in a typical day makes you an extreme outlier.

Sure? I just wanted to make note of something I think is great and underrated about Electron. The outlier-y nature of that something is exactly why my next paragraph starts with "More broadly,".

> Widely used doesn't mean popular. Teams for example. Many widely used Electron apps are chosen by employers. Or are free and have network effects. Or became dominant as native apps and have a moat.

> Arq went back to native because users hated the Electron version. Slack users who see Ripcord say the company should hire the developer. I almost never hear anything positive about the Spotify app.

VS Code and Discord are the big ones that come to mind as both widely used and widely preferred by their users.

I don't think the fact that it's possible to build shitty applications in Electron is very interesting, since that's true of every other UI framework. Neither does the fact that some people actively dislike e.g. VS Code contradict the fact that a great many people like it very much and independently choose to use it.

> Do you claim Electron apps have fewer sketchy practices?

I'm not sure where you think I claimed this, but since you asked: I think sketchy practices are common throughout the consumer software industry, and I don't think there's anything about Electron that forces developers using it to implement sketchy practices.

If they do, that's on them. And since Electron is so common in consumer software these days, I'd caution you to remember that correlation does not imply causation.

Electron app developers and extreme outliers bring it up all the time. It seems over rated to me.

Discord is free and has network effects. Lots of users complain about it. It competes with another Electron app mostly.

VS Code is free and has network effects. And high overhead and lots of custom UI are the norm for IDEs. I don't think anyone meant Electron is suitable for nothing.

Arq users didn't hate the Electron version because it was shittier than other Electron apps. They hated it because it was the normal level of shitty for Electron apps. Teams, Slack, and Spotify show many users doesn't mean happy users.

I didn't say you claimed Electron apps have fewer sketchy practices. But it's strange and pointless to just praise Electron apps for a minimum of sketchy practices if you don't.

> network effects

Unless you have a true captive market or some crazy sales-focused enterprise business, you can't get network effects without first achieving that critical mass of users more or less on your product's own merits, and if your software is shitty and/or pointless then you are not going to get there.

> Lots of users complain about it

Discord has like 200M+ MAUs, so of course "lots" of users complain about it.

> But it's strange and pointless to just praise Electron apps for a minimum of sketchy practices if you don't.

I'm not praising them for any such thing—I was just calling out the fact that most consumer software these days is abusive, so we have to be careful to speak about abuse in relative terms. I don't think Electron "apps" are on average better or worse, and if (looking at data) they did turn out to be better or worse in this regard then I would attribute that to the widespread adoption of Electron "apps" in certain market segments that tend toward abuse, rather than some inherent property of the framework that encourages it.

In other words, the baseline for modern consumer software is to abuse the user, and I don't believe there is some inherent property of Electron that encourages (or discourages) that trend.

> you can't get network effects without first achieving that critical mass of users more or less on your product's own merits

No one said VS Code and Discord had no merits at all.

Discord's core users were gamers. People who can afford to run much more demanding software for fun. People who don't care about accessibility mostly. It's free like I mentioned. It competes with Slack mostly. Slack has the same problems mostly. And 1 of Slack's merits on its way to critical mass was compatibility with other apps.

VS Code's early merits were it was faster than Atom and free unlike Sublime Text.

> Discord has like 200M+ MAUs, so of course "lots" of users complain about it.

A large fraction in my experience. "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."[1]

> I was just calling out the fact that most consumer software these days is abusive, so we have to be careful to speak about abuse in relative terms.

Who said anything about abuse before you?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Using all of Windows, macOS, and Linux in a typical day makes you an extreme outlier.

Another extreme outlier here, so according to the 100/10/1 rule of 100 readers/10 voters/1 commenters we have 200 extreme outliers just in this thread ;-)

(Although I should note that I don't use all of them every day. Mac is a Mac mini in our office at home, Linux is both on a work laptop and also on an old personal laptop that gets used for personal learning and personal projects, Windows is a work laptop. Telegram an Joplin gets used across all of them.)

> so many people fail to realize the success of Electron is in making desktop applications so much more approachable for those that are mainly front-end focused developers/hackers.

I don't know who failed to realize this. I rarely see comments refusing to admit that "building one electron app is easier than building 3 native apps for Windows/Mac/Linux". Most of people criticize the use of electron when megacorps undervalue user experience and make all sorts of excuses to use electron for the sake of cost saving in software development.

In many HN posts, as users who are technical enough to understand the impact of electron apps on their computers, I think the general idea is that native apps simply feel better and electron should not be encouraged.

> At the end of the day, so many people fail to realize the success of Electron is in making desktop applications so much more approachable for those that are mainly front-end focused developers/hackers

Front end focused? It makes desktop apps accessible period. Someone inevitably mentions QT in these conversations. Find me a single successful QT based app. Electron is really the only cross platform option.

> Someone inevitable mentions QT in these conversations. Find me a single successful QT based app.

Let me start with Telegram. The ux is universally liked (yes, even by the Mac crowd!)

> Front end focused? It makes desktop apps accessible period.

If someone just wanted to create cross platform applications quickly and push them upon people who don't have a choice (i.e. in an enterprise) there always used to be Java Swing as well.

Far easier than Electron, even approaching VB6-simplicity in GUI design, but with a sane language behind.

So, GP was right: It makes it easier for frontend devs.

Edit: yes, a lot.

Musescore? Wireshark? Transmission? TeXStudio?

If you are into 3d printing or design, Fusion 360 is another application you might encounter.

I don't want to be dismissive and those apps are definitely successful and good at what they do but they all look like they were designed in the early 2000s. And I'm pretty sure some were.

And that's good. Early 2000s had a consistent no-nonsense look made for real work, instead of this fad with every application trying to mimic a phone app or a startup landing page.

You just show how disconnected this discussion is from reality.

Good? I wouldn't say it's good, it's completely neutral and unrelated to morality. There is so much emotional and moral language that goes on in every discussion about electron that is just not relevant. People talk about "wasted resources", we aren't talking about plastic bags here. Electron apps aren't bitcoin or fossil fuels. If we were to take a look at things contributing to climate change electron would be irrelevant to the future of our planet.

No-nonsense? Why does software have to be no-nonsense? I'd prefer for software to be beautiful.

I would say that there is an indirect consequence to wasteful resource usage: e-waste. I have a pile of old laptops and cell phones that are still perfectly functional hardware-wise but are basically useless because of the bloat of modern software. Sure, one electron app using hundreds of MB of RAM doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but when you run 6 of them and your machine only has 2 GB of RAM, now more than half your RAM is gone. And for what? A "beautiful" software experience? I'd take a functional and fast program over a "beautiful" one any day, no question.

Good means many things. Pleasing. Useful. Not just virtuous.

People complaining about resources mean the limited resources of their computers usually. But it does lead to wasted natural resources by making hardware obsolete faster. And wasted financial resources. And slow and inconsistent interfaces waste cognitive resources.

No nonsense means functional. Not ugly.

Keep in mind that there are maybe 100 or more users with electron apps for each cryptocurrency miner.

The goalpost was

> Find me a single successful QT based app.

And you've been provided a long list. Please don't move the goalpost.

>Find me a single successful QT based app

What?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)#Applications_usi...

What a weird thing to say. Ableton, 3ds Max, Photoshop Elements, Google Earth, Mathematica... Qt probably has a longer list of success stories than any other cross platform UI toolkit.

One might wonder if this comes up because qt is a good cross-platform toolkit... which is to say, it promptly fades into the background and you don't notice you're using it.

Because the worst abusers of Electron can afford to have dedicated teams for platforms.

Do you think Slack can't hire enough developers to build native platforms for Mac/Windows/Linux? Spotify? Discord?

I get it for small dev teams to build a cross platform app - but at a certain size, I don't understand why they can't go build native apps that aren't garbage.

Didn't spotify used to have a native platform application?

Yes. Same with 1Password.

Correct, but I'm also not saying that isn't true? They aren't mutually exclusive. Electron can still be good/useful for many people, and companies like Spotify/Discord/Slack can still get criticized for not hiring devs to make dedicated teams to build native apps. Just because some companies are choosing the technology in ways people don't like, doesn't make the technology itself bad. I hardly ever see anyone phrase it that way, though. It's only "ELECTRON BAD", not "SLACK IS BAD FOR USING ELECTRON."

It's a crutch so big companies can cheap out and ship subpar, lowest common denominator software that is bloated and slow.

It is good for small teams to be able to rapidly build cross platform apps that are good for MVP.

Slack is bad for using electron.

I absolutely believe Slack can’t hire enough developers to build native platforms for Mac/Windows/Linux without hilariously extensive & expensive retraining.

Have you tried to hire developers with eg AppKit experience in the past 5 years? I have, twice. Neither were small companies. Both routes went electron because 95% of the native Mac developer pool works in Cupertino or China, and it’s a kiddy pool at that.

:shrug:

They're a business so the question is not whether they technically have the cash available to do a thing, the question is whether doing that thing will yield the best return on investment compared to all the other things they could do.

Specifically, if Slack created new development teams to build native clients for Mac and Windows, would that effort eventually yield enough additional revenue to be worthwhile?

(Mind you, I don't know the answer to that question because I don't know Slack's financials, just pointing out that it's the real question governing whether they should use Electron.)

Easier?

You can get a functional, graphical, Hello World! WinForms app running in like 10 seconds, ok, perhaps 20 seconds if your computer is slow

I can teach anybody with very basic programming skills to build something fancy in like 2 hours

No idea about Mac environment, but I guess it must be similar.

For some reason Windows apis are like hieroglyphs to me — coming from Mac Storyboard/ UIKit conventions…

Any advice?

The WinApi is too low level for most developers and situations.

Usually, you won't need to directly call any API function to build even a complex program.

.NET comes with everything included

I’m not trying to ship hello world, I’m trying to ship a 100k line frontend with 60fps animations, PDF export, video and audio recording, and 3rd party html rendering. Try doing that with WinForms - the batteries are very much not included. Windows APIs are just a mess.

And if I succeed then my prize is what? I get to do it again on two other platforms?

> the success of Electron is in making desktop applications so much more approachable for those that are mainly front-end focused

Enabling more sht being shipped is not a badge of honor for a technology. Same goes for Visual Basic and Go, and for all those effort to dumb down software development when what the world needs is for quality* in software to be valued over quantity.

Many people fail to realize that the user just does not care. Does the app work? Non nerds do not care that it's not elegant under the hood or that it eats memory and storage.

> Are there better ways to build native apps?

Depends. Is it a choice between using Electron or drowning in complexity and not shipping anything at all? An app is better than no app.

As one of those haters, I would have so much less of a problem with it if it wasn't a sledgehammer of a platform, and a resource hog. IMO it's just plain disrespectful to users to inflict them with this crap

Also, I'm pretty sure it's easier to fire of Visual Studio and start clicking-and-dragging controls onto a form in C#, and you get a better programming language with it to boot. It's just too bad WinForms/WPF aren't cross-platform...

Why are so many people slobbering over web developers and front end people any way?

99.999% of what Electron does may be achieved bundling your content into a single HTML file on your desktop. For the remaining .001% you are paying a ridiculous prize in terms of performance and space utilization.

Electron does not solve a "massive problem". It solves a very minor problem. But web developers are precisely the people who rather than studying the target's platform or studying their own platform (you probably don't need Electron) would just do the most nonsensical thing that comes to mind.

> I always get a chuckle at all the hate Electron gets on HN, or in very technical communities.

Oh so true. It is such an indicator of lack of experience, too. Clearly they have never tried to support a cross-platform application, because Electron is utterly seamless from Win10 to Mac to Linux, even for USB and serial hardware. It has shaved literal man-years off development of our primary application at my company.

It's like haters are just admitting how junior they are.

> I always get a chuckle at all the hate Electron gets on HN, or in very technical communities

I, too, can tear down a straw man. But there are economical factors at play here and it's strange that you think that technical workers are oblivious to them.

Electron is compounding a problem that is not going away soon, or ever. People will not buy more expensive laptops to do their work (many simply can't). In the era of remote work the costs more laptops that can take the load that an Electron app introduces, is swallowed by employers -- and some don't want to do it.

This pressure is mounting, I assure you. Employers keep complaining there are no employees -- and what they actually mean is "we can't find people with laptops good enough for Slack and Discord and Excel and we don't want to buy them those". And I am not talking about programming jobs -- there it's usually very well understood that you have to buy the staff good machines (although I've been issued some pretty average machines but hey).

So employers keep screaming that they need more and better workers. The potential workers are like "eff this crap, I am not getting paid enough to buy a MacBook", plus many people have enough common sense not to reinvest their income in tech that company should have bought them in the first place.

How do you think this tug of war is going to end? By proclaiming "coding with Electron" (or PHP / WordPress since you mentioned them) is a basic human right? (lol) At one point something will give out and I can assure you it's not going to be society. It's going to be the tech companies who can't ever be bothered to invest a little bit in creating a cross-platform GUI toolkit.

So yeah, keep going on and on about how the technical people don't understand important things. From where I am standing it looks like that it's you who doesn't get it -- you are only bringing up ease of development, and there are much more factors in this situation.

We get all that and we're saying that it comes with massive tradeoffs. The cost is massive resource footprints, inflexibility, sluggish performance, harder to reason about from a security or performance point of view because of the tower of software and abstraction you're building on top of. Many reasons.

I'm not saying it's not useful but I'm not falling over myself to argue we should all be using this stuff.

True. I also get a chuckle, when people say housing, medicine, healthcare, daycare college is too expensive. Imagine if these good things simply did not exist. It would be much worse.

So whiner need to shut up already and buy a new computer annually where electron run normally.

The anti-Electron crowd understands the reasons Electron has taken off just as you understand that there are benefits to native apps. It's just a matter of different priorities.

I don't think anybody is on a particularly high horse.

I only have so many gb of ram which means i am limited in the number of electron apps i can run on my system

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