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Comment by afefers | Hacker News Reader

This is fantastic but I can't see myself using it simply because it uses Electron.

I'm sure there's worse hiding beneath the covers of some apps you use on a regular basis; e.g. Teams, Office, most AA/AAA games, etc. While Electron is far from optimal, just because a great app is built on top of it doesn't make that app any less great.

As an example, although I do have a prejudice against Electron based apps myself, that doesn't prevent me from using VSCode, which itself is based on Electron. VSCode is pretty great, and I'm not going to not use it simply because it uses Electron.

Yeah but it all adds up. Go look at the top energy, memory, cpu consuming apps in Activity Monitor.

The top offenders are all electron based.

Okay so we need the chat apps and the coding apps to be electron, those are always running.

Okay now VPN apps need electron for some reason, okay now this scripting app needs it, okay those have to run all the time.

Shit where'd my battery life and memory go? Oh the 6 electron apps running nonstop.

Using electron generally means 10x cpu, energy, and memory usage. I'd say that is less great all on its own.

Hey 10x of zero is still zero. :p

Definitely, but those are large and complex applications. This is a fancy dropdown.

I agree. web browsers need to become a service in the OS that can securely be shared. Electron apps are crap until that happens.

They already are – there's a system webview on Windows and macOS. There are a few "Electron alternatives" that use the system webview instead of bundling a copy of Chromium. Tauri [0] is one of them, built around Rust, and it's pretty great. I built a video editor with it.

The usual complaint against this is that you have to support multiple browsers (Edge/Chromium on Windows, Safari on Mac).

0: https://tauri.app

Are those services or just shared libraries? I would imagine, although I'm not sure this is the case, that 50 tabs in a browser consume fewer resources than 50 individual WebViews.

They already are on android, iOS, and windows.

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