- AI bad - JavaScript bad - Developers not understanding why Electron has utility because they don't understand the browser as a fourth OS platform - Electron eats my ram oh no posted from my 2gb thinkpad
You mean incongruent styles? As in, incongruent to the host OS.
There is no doubt electron apps allow the style to be consistent across platforms.
Compare to other software on Mac such as Pages, Xcode, Tower, Transmission, Pixelmator, mp3tag, Table plus, Postico, Paw, Handbrake etc, (the other i use) etc those are a delight to work with and give me the computing experience I was looking for buying a Mac.
XCode is usually the first example that comes to mind of a terrible native app in comparison to the much nicer VSCode.
Electron apps look the same on each platform therefore they are consistent.
The meta point is the effort required to be consistent with the OS.
You listed MacOS only apps, emphasising the point.
To do a per OS consistent experience is N times the effort.
Code is not the cost. Engineers are. Bugs come from hindsight not foresight. Let’s divide resources between OSs. Let all diverge.
> They are often laggy or unresponsive. They don’t integrate well with OS features.
> (These last two issues can be addressed by smart development and OS-specific code, but they rarely are. The benefits of Electron (one codebase, many platforms, it’s just web!) don’t incentivize optimizations outside of HTML/JS/CSS land
Give stats. Often, rarely. What apps? I’d say rarely, often. People code bad native UIs too, or get constrained in features.
Claude offer a CLI tool. Like what product manager would say no to electron in that situation.
This article makes no sense in context. The author surely gets that.
This is based on the premise that LLM-corpos are right. And if they are wrong, then the laughs about their hypocrisy is doubly deserved :) .
>There are downsides though. Electron apps are bloated; each runs its own Chromium engine. The minimum app size is usually a couple hundred megabytes. They are often laggy or unresponsive. They don’t integrate well with OS features.
A few hundred megabytes to a few gb sounds like an end user problem. They can either make room or not use your application.
You can easily buy a laptop for around 400 USD that will run Claude code just fine, along with several other electron apps.
Don't get me wrong, native everything ( which would probably mean sacrificing Linux support) would be a bit better, but it's not a deal breaker.
Should they have re-written Chromium too?
Projects with much smaller budget than Atrophic has achieved much better x-plat UI without relying on electron [1]. There are more sensible options like Qt and whatnot for rendering UIs.
You can even engineer your app to have a single core with all the business logic as a single shared library. Then write UI wrappers using SwiftUI, GTK, and whatever microsoft feels like putting out as current UI library (I think currently it's WinUI2) consuming the core to do the interesting bits.
Heck there are people whom built gui toolkits from scratch to support their own needs [2].
[1] - https://musescore.org/en [2] - https://www.gpui.rs
What really am I to conclude by the mere fact that they used electron? The AI was not so magical that it overcame sense?
Am I to imagine that the fact that they advertise AI coding means I therefore have a window into their development process and their design choices?
I just think the notion is much sillier than all of us seem to be treating it.
Maybe their dog food isn't as tasty as they want you to believe.
What are we to presume from the fact that they did not do that?
And therefore, what?
That’s what’s missing and I think we should just be clear on: it is a design choice to choose electron over writing a native app.
If it really is a design choice then it's a bad decision imo.
these are all also the results of bad design choices or a lack of resources?
When discord and slack started the company was not large so it definitely could have been a lack of resources. Could also have been a bad design choice.
I'm not alone on that either at all. This is a pretty common opinion.
Claude had a chance to really show something special here and they blew it.
Does this work on people usually?
Regardless the only thing keeping those millions of people at this point is lock-in. Even then people are actively looking for ways to move away from it. I'm witnessing the migration now and am looking forward to the day I don't have to hard restart the client 2-3 times a day.
What does any of the malaise about discord have to do with their choice of runtime?
It is an untested hypothesis that if discord had a native app, all the problems that people complain about would disappear. I think people in hacker news like to just assert the hypothesis because sounds better than cross platform. But in this particular case, it is fundamentally untested. We simply don’t know that the app would be better if it were native.
I just saw your other posts in this thread though.
1. Anthropic had no problem spending tens of thouands of dollars of tokens re-writing the C compiler a couple weeks ago before abandonining it within hours of launch, despite promising that fixes were coming in the following days. 2. Regardless are you arguing that re-writing Chromium would have been a good solution for the original suggestion of native apps? Aren't there better existing approaches from companies that don't claim to have the best coders, nor are worth hundreds of millions, billions, tens of billions, nor hundreds of billions of dollars, so I'm unsure why you made that specific suggestion? Wouldn't pointing to an existing product's native approach be a better suggestion?
What really is the argument and the threshold we’re proposing here?
I just think the idea that we have some sort of vision into their design process because we can look at some externally visible feature of the design is silly. Am I supposed to presume the same thing about capabilities for every shop that creates an electron app? Am I supposed to take anyone’s native app and see that as a claim that they’ve cracked coding?
These things are just orthogonal to the questions at hand. They’re just simply not related and everyone here seems to pretend like they are.
We can all talk about how this or that app should be different, but the idea is "electron sux => ????? "
Why should I care that they didn't rebuild the desktop app I don't use. Their TUI is really nice.
What's in that for me?
I didn’t say AI was bad and I acknowledged the benefits of Electron and why it makes sense to choose it.
With 64gb of RAM on my Mac Studio, Claude desktop is still slow! Good Electron apps exist, it’s just an interesting note give recent spec driven development discussion.