Also, I liked the idea on this site of responding to twitter comments by posting them whole on the site and writing the response below. It feels more like it is an older style mailing list that way.
It’s always small things like keyboard shortcuts, focus behaviour, placement of controls, but it’s all one more roadblock to using the computer. The more we have to consciously think about what we’re doing because we can’t rely on consistent muscle memory, the less effective of a tool the computer becomes.
It’s not even just the Electron/web based stuff either. Drag and drop in Office for Mac doesn’t work the same way as every other Mac app, and it throws me every single time.
One of the biggest examples of this is "dark mode", something which arguably isn't that old in a Mac context, but Windows let you choose the appearance of individual UI elements --- colours, fonts, sizes, etc. --- and everything native in the system would automatically match. That is, until Windows ~8 or so, when they gutted most of the customisation, only to later reintroduce as a half-baked "dark mode".
Let me check something... I open "Terminal.app" and what is this? I can't move around my cursor with my keybindings that I use in Sublime and VSCode (Cmd + Arrow to jump to start or end of line). Why do I quit a session with Ctrl + D? What is even this Ctrl key, I'm used to Cmd + anything on the Mac?
Isn't it odd that devs spend a lot of time in the Terminal, but apparently aren't as obsessed about the inconsistent keybindings vs the rest of macOS there?
Moreover, the internet is full of people asking how to enable MacOS shortcuts in Terminal. And iTerm.app even comes with a "natural editing" preset precisely because of that.
You’re correct, it would very much annoy me if my terminal was inconsistent with the rest of the system, and I am disappointed that the system terminal is not setting a good example.
They do. It's just that they are not technical enough to say "I don't want a web based app".
They say "this app is slow". "Why is my computer hot all the time?". "Why doesn't my screenreader work in the app?". "Why can't I use my keyboard the way I use it in other apps?" "Why can't it keep window size and location"
And a thousand other questions.
Electron also has an (comparatively) awesome Dev experience in regard to the tooling available and the nodejs ecosystem.
Why doesn’t VS Code have macOS’s native file name/location controls in the title bar? Why does it freak out if I move a file while it’s open?
This is just moving the goalposts.
A cross-platform toolkit that implemented compliant looks and behaviors across all of its supported platforms would be an amazing thing.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't people with serious accessibility needs typically prefer web because there are way more tools optimized for web than for native?
I'm going to push back against this just because it feels like sort of the "cool" thing to say around HN. I certainly understand some users on some hardware may have had a negative experience with Electron, but I haven't. I have never felt an Electron app (primarily Slack and Spotify) was sluggish or negatively affected my overall experience on my laptop in any way. Granted, I've always had relatively decent MacBook Pros, but this "common HN refrain" has simply never been an issue for me.
That's exactly why it's never been an issue, and will likely never be an issue for you.
Most people (with the exception of gamers, who are still not "most people") do not have relatively recent MacBook Pros - they have machines that are significantly weaker. All of my non-gamer, non-techie friends have 4-to-7-year-old computers that are significantly weaker than my already-lackluster ultrabook that struggles to run Discord and watch a 1080p YouTube video at the same time. That is the average person's experience on desktop/laptop computers (not mobile devices).
You may never had had to deal with this, but that's because you've only used machines that are far more powerful than the median.
Users don't like slow and bloated. Given equal choice users prefer small and fast. Of course, they are okay with Spotify client, because there's no native Spotify client with the same functionality. People want to have the service, but don't think that everyone is okay with how this service is packaged.
That is - just because Electron will get faster with some optimization doesn't mean that it's possible to become enough faster while still completely implementing the various web specifications.
Absolutely true. I don't like that the web is so complex there are only a few competing implementations. Still, it's the best we got in terms of platform support.
> doesn't mean that it's possible to become enough faster
Unless you bloat your app with tons of frameworks, I don't think the issue is speed, but size, which is true for web in general. Almost all of that size can be deduplicated (and some big parts even discarded).
Probably because Windows was always a UI/UX clusterfuck, so Windows users don’t notice the difference. Mac enthusiasts on the other hand…