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Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

Lovely to see this space continue to grow.

Despite the hate it gets, Electron is an incredible tool to be able to quickly create a decent native experience (and as someone who uses linux - I tend to get native apps with company support, which is miles ahead of where I was 10 years ago).

I'm glad to see folks playing around with the native installed webviews - now that MS is all in on webview2, this feels like a good solution to some of the bloat required by locking a chromium version in electron.

Slightly more likely to hit compatibility issues across machines, but for most apps not using cutting edge apis - not too much of a concern.

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> create a decent native experience

I never found an electron application that was even remotely "decent" or "native". The best one I used was Element (Matrix), any other way somewhere between "somewhat usable, but not good" (Webex) and "mv program /dev/null" (Teams)

The only way to get a good native experience, is to write native apps, using the native Toolkit.

> The only way to get a good native experience, is to write native apps, using the native Toolkit.

Hey - I'd love it if companies would do that too. But in the mean time... I'm not enough of an ass to throw away the solutions that work.

That said - Webex is not an electron app (Appears to be QT...). Teams is terrible by itself (no electron needed). Other apps do just fine... So I'm not sure what it is you think you're comparing.

Slack/Discord/Etcher are all electron, and frankly they work fine (etcher is even nice).

So between "You're on linux and we don't support that" vs "Here's a working app with company support (electron based)"... I know which I'd pick.

Ah, well you are right, webex is not even Electron, does not even remotely look like Qt.

Discord was - last time I used it on the desktop - awfully sluggish and basically even worse than in a browser.

We can just extend it to non-electron toolkits (E.g. Java Swing):

- Splash screen (E.g. I've rarely/never seen a native Libadwaita/GTK program that used one, they may exist, but are really rare in the linux world, examples: Teams, Mediathekview)

- Custom notifications (E.g. in teams, if you download a file, you get undismissable - at least for me ^^ - notifications that stay always on top)

- Weird custom things (E.g. Teams draws on close and minify buttons, that makes no sense)

- Order of the buttons in e.g. boxes (Is it Yes-No or No-Yes?)

That's how I measure "native-ness"

And a lot of electron apps tend to have web versions anyways (I mean why not, right?), so you're probably supporting all the big browsers already, so you might as well use the platform's native webview.

This isn't really true (often, but not always).

etcher is electron based - https://www.balena.io/etcher/

But given it's writing to removable media and is an offline only experience - there's no reason to host a page at all.

Works great across every OS I use it on.

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