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Comment by ra0x03 | Hacker News Reader

My guy if you can’t see the problem with a $300B SF company that of course claims to #HireTheBest having a dumpy UX due to their technical choices I don’t really know what to tell you. Same goes for these companies having npm as an out-of-the-box dependency for their default CLI tools. I’m going to assume anyone who thinks that every user’s machine is powerful enough to run electron apps, or even support bloated deps hasn’t written any serious software. And that’s fine in general (to each their own!), but these companies publicly, strongly, claim to be the best, and hire the best. These are not small 10 people startups.

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Who both has a computer too slow to handle electron applications ,and is spending 20$ a month on Claude code.

>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.

Me, because my work gave me a crappy dell that can barely run the stripe dashboard in the browser. I could put in a request for a Mac or something faster but this is the standard machine everyone gets for the company. It helps me be sympathetic to my users to make sure what I develop is fast enough for them because I definitely am going to make it fast enough for me so I don’t shoot my brains out during development.

Claude desktop already doesn't support Linux.

Linux users famously don't pay for anything.

Presumably these competent people could look at electron, think about building their own cross-platform application on top of chromium and conclude that this free as in code and beer tool fit their needs.

Should they have re-written Chromium too?

Bun exists and building a ui on too of that should be well within the power of the money they have. No one is saying to rebuild the universe but the current state is embarrassing.

Yeah but what does the statement refute?

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.

You could build the same tui in the same amount of time with the same effort and end with an overall better product. Spend a little more and it is even better. Why can we not expect more from companies that have more?

The "more" here I'm to expect is they choose a native application over electron?

What's in that for me?

There's other ways to make cross platforms apps than to build them on top of a web browser

Yes, and?

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.

I disagree. It's often chosen due to lack of resources to make native applications.

If it really is a design choice then it's a bad decision imo.

Discord, 1Password, Slack, GitHub Desktop, VS Code.

these are all also the results of bad design choices or a lack of resources?

I've used 3/5 of those programs significantly and have issues with all of them relating to software quality. Especially discord. So bad I have 4 different servers actively trying alternatives.

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.

They all have millions of active users doing complex tasks in them every day! I's laughable that you expect me to take your vague complaints about Discord seriously not just as complaints but as dispositive signs that electron was a bad design choice.

Does this work on people usually?

Discord could have been a lack of resources as I previously said. They weren't a billion dollar company when the application was conceived.

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 this have to do with choosing an electron app over a native app?

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.

That was only 1/3 of the electron applications which you hyper fixated on. If I use 10 applications a day and the 3 of them I (and countless other people) consistently have a problem with share something in common. Well, I'll let you figured that one out on your own.

I just saw your other posts in this thread though.

Appeal to popularity fallacy.

At least attempt a real sentence.

Popularity is not an indicator of anything other than marketing skills. How popular a product is has absolutely nothina to do with its technical merits, as can be seen from garbage like Microsoft Teams.

Is teams bad because it’s an electron app?

They don't have to reinvent electron. They shouldn't need to use a whole virtualized operating system to call their web API with a fancy UI.

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

And? So what?

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.

They have the resources to make native UI for all six major platforms without any AI assistance at all.

Maybe their dog food isn't as tasty as they want you to believe.

They are compute constrained and they have tens of millions of dollars of free cash flow. They could’ve written that app in COBOL for God sake.

What are we to presume from the fact that they did not do that?

They have the resources to do a lot of things, what else should they waste them on?

It's only a waste if you don't care about the quality of your app or wasting your customers time and resources.

You are unfamiliar with native toolkits?

You are unfamiliar with design choices?

I think letting designers make engineering choices is not a path that can lead to good results.

Who said anything about designers?

> Should they have re-written Chromium too?

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?

I’m just saying that the consensus seems to be that they should’ve rebuilt what was inside electron so why not just insist that AI doesn’t work until they’ve recreated chrome?

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.

You, who can't see that they are a $300b SF company without caring about that, are probably missing something. Customers don't buy "serious software" they buy shit that works. They literally don't have the capacity to blame the things you want them to blame, they will buy a faster computer if they think the one they have is slow. And they already have a faster computer than the average HN commenter complaining that an Electron webview is slowing down their dogshit 25 year old computer.

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