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Comment by matt_holden | Hacker News Reader

Also: Figma, Linear, Notion, Slack, Superhuman, Pitch, Loom. All Electron.

I’ve never understood the hate Electron gets on HN, when it powers so many great products that users love.

I don't think you realize how slow those are, how slow they make your entire machine (eating the RAM for no good reason) and how insanely fast similar apps could be if written in something that doesn't involve massive bloat.

Electron is also how Microsoft essentially broke Skype (on purpose?) IMO.

For me Electron just stands for lazy companies/devs who are not interested in producing something elegant that runs as fast as possible.

Honest question: where does all the RAM go? If a chrome tab eats about 200 MB ram, shouldn’t an electron app consume about the same? After all Electron is just an SPA with all the assets packaged with the browser engine. Like the zip’d web archives of yore

Chrome engine is build for browsing the web multiple windows multiple tabs etc.

If you drive with a empty truck with trailer it uses more oil than a car.

Chrome is not designed for this. There are other engines like https://sciter.com that are work for single apps, but probably scale bad if they are misused as a browser.

I just opened Chrome to a news website and got 400MB of usage on the "GPU Process", 150MB on the "tab" process, and 100MB on the "browser" process. In Electron the webpage doesn't have access to native APIs like the system tray, so that's done by exchanging messages with an extra process.

> I don't think you realize how slow those are, how slow they make your entire machine (eating the RAM for no good reason)

You're on a forum full of software developers, I think you can give us credit for knowing exactly how much resources the apps we use take up.

Personally, I frequently run VSCode, Slack, Zoom, Chrome, and occasionally Loom at the same time on a machine with 8gb ram and it's fine. Until one of these new platforms like Tauri or Socket.sh catches up, the trade off for developers being able to develop once and run on multiple platforms is entirely understandable and clearly acceptable to most people.

Fully agree on all points, I've never had a performance issue with Electron.

I have had Slack fill my home directory with logs once , long time ago. But that wasn't an electron problem.

Cool. I'm a single developer releasing software for free which is only made possible by Electron and wouldn't exist without it but I guess I'm just lazy.

You're lazy and you should feel bad! /s

The ones of these I've actually used like Slack are doggie doo. Aside from using way more resources than a chat app should, last I checked basic UX was not close to on par with native, like right mouse clicks didn't do anything but bring up the built in browser menus.

>like right mouse clicks didn't do anything but bring up the built in browser menus.

You should try this in slack again...

That UX decision has nothing to do w/ Electron.

If someone brings up a single example they should ensure it aligns to their criticisms, as a rule.

I don't mind using an Electron app. The problem is, they are multiplying too fast. I currently use: 1Password, VS Code, Discord and / or Element, Obsidian, and Postman. They use most of the machine's resources doing nothing at all.

Slack took great pains to make the client not be a memory and CPU hog.

Still better than Teams though. (Which is also in Electron.)

You can also see the pains the Evernote team took from the initial Electron-based 10 release until it became usable again. But you could also feel the product moving again after stagnation on a gazillion native clients. It was the right albeit mostly final engineering decision they took.

It surely was the right decision, but it came too late.

Also, still the app is almost worthless on my Android phone. Too slow, despite large improvement.

"Powers" being a relevant word here. People love to call out various tech/choices for needlessly sending our energy into a black hole, has anyone run the numbers for Electron's negative impact versus a non-wasteful solution?

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