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Does anyone actually choose to ship an Electron app instead of a web app in order to benefit from UI consistency? Most Electron apps I've seen either share a codebase with a web app that's also made available (so the codebase still has to be tested cross-browser), or else can't be web apps because they need full filesystem privileges or otherwise don't work with the browser's security model.

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Yep, we use Electron specifically because it gives us a locked-down version of Chromium with a consistent WebGPU implementation. Without that, we're stuck dealing with whatever browser version the user happens to have, and that completely wrecks the stability of our GPU pipeline.

Okay, fair, none of the apps I had in mind make much use of WebGPU and it stands to reason that browser diversity might be a bigger problem with a very complicated and relatively less mature API like that one.

Yes, it is the biggest selling point. You almost never need to debug user/platform specific UI bugs -- if the app starts, it will render the same. There might be some GPU issues, but that's not due to the framework itself.

Electron apps often fully share codebase with the Web apps, so on the app backend you implement native functionality and communicate with your app via IPC.

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