Claude is an Electron App because we've lost native
tonsky.me
tonsky.me
The first thing you need when you make something new is making it work, it is much better that it works badly than having something not working at all.
Take for example the Newcomen engine, with an abysmal efficiency of half a percent. You needed 90 times more fuel than an engine today, so it could only be used in the mines were the fuel was.
It worked badly, but it worked. Later came efficiency.
The same happened with locomotives. So bad efficiency at first, but it changed the world.
The first thing AI people had to do is making it work in all OSes. Yeah, it works badly but it works.
We downloaded some Clojure editor made in java to test if we were going to deploy it in our company. It gave us some obscure java error in different OSes like linux or Mac configurations. We discarded it. It did not work.
We have engineers and we can fix those issues but it is not worth it. The people that made this software do not understand basic things.
We have Claude working in hundreds of computers with different OSes. It just works.
There's nothing "good" about electron. Hell, there are even easier ways of getting high performance cross platform software out there. Electron was used because it's a default, defacto choice that nobody bothered with even researching or testing if it was the right choice, or even a good choice.
"It just works". A rabid raccoon mashing its face on a keyboard could plausibly produce a shippable electron app. Vibe-bandit development. (This is not a selling point.) People claiming to be software developers should aim to do better.
You might as well tell reality to do better: The reality of physics (water flows downhill, electricity moves through the best conductor, systems settle where the least energy is required) and the reality of business (companies naturally move toward solutions that cost less time, less money, and less effort)
I personally think that some battles require playing within the rules of the game. Not to wish for new rules. Make something that requires less effort and resources than Electron but is good enough, and people will be more likely to use it.
Using electron and doing things shittily is a choice. If you're ever presented with a choice between doing something well and not, do the best you can. Electron is never the best choice. It's not even the easiest, most efficient choice. It's the lazy, zero effort, default, ad-hoc choice picked by someone who really should know better but couldn't be bothered to even try.
Windows' Metro/Modern UI was pretty good from different perspectives, but didn't have enough effort put into it to make it a universal thing fit for multiple purposes (half of the Windows settings was still in Control Panel for quite some time), wasn't familiar for users (so they hated it) and wasn't familiar for developers (so they created hideous apps).
In the opposing Linux camp, GNOME made Gtk 4 with Libadwaita UI library with "everything is a phone app" mindset that not every app can adopt. For example, there's no application menu (a line with File, View, Edit, etc.) component shipped by default, you should make it yourself or get it somewhere. So now GIMP is developed using Gtk 3 (not modern 4) because it has all the components GIMP needs. Trying to get GNOME developers to implement some stuff outside of their vision is a futile effort.
The same search incidentally turned up that Qt requires a paid license for commercial projects, which is surprising to me and obviously makes it an even less attractive choice than Electron. Being less useful and costing more isn't a great combo.
You can with WASM (but you shouldn't).
> Qt requires a paid license for commercial projects
It doesn't, it requires paid license if you don't want to abide with (L)GPL license, which should be fair deal, right? You want to get paid for your closed-source product, so you should not have any reservations about paying for their product that enables you to create your product, right? Or is it "money for me, but not for thee"?
> Being less useful and costing more isn't a great combo.
Very nice, but now explain why you are talking about using Qt to create apps, whereas grandparent talks about experience with apps created with Qt.
It should go without saying that the requirements of the LGPL license are less attractive than the MIT one Electron has, fairness doesn't really come into it. Beyond the licensing hurdles that Qt devotes multiple pages of its website to explaining, they also gate commercial features such as "3D and graphs capabilities" [1] behind the paid license price, which are more use cases that are thoroughly covered by more permissively licensed web projects that already work everywhere.
On your last point I'm completely lost; it's late here so it might be me but I'm not sure what distinction you're making. I guess I interpreted dmix' comment generally to be about the process of producing software with either approach given that my comment above was asking for details on alternatives from the perspective of a developer and not a user. I don't have any personal beef with using apps that are written with Qt.
[0] https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/wasm.html#accessibility-and-screen-re...
[1] https://www.qt.io/development/qt-framework/commercial-qt
But the author of a comment I originally replied to has:
> I might hate Qt apps more than I hate Electron
therefore it is your insertion about dev experience and license costs of Qt vs MIT-licensed web frameworks that makes me lost.
Plus I use Mac these days and Qt apps just never looked right on that platform.
At least web apps looks like web apps.
https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan
Cosmopolitan can be used to bundle up any gui package, and your code, and a team of professional software devs should be able to cope with it just fine. You end up with a native executable with a slightly bigger package to ship, since it's carrying executables for various platforms, but you'd effectively have the same code and behavior everywhere. A few extra megabytes, instead of whatever the hell electron is doing. They could also use Java, or even one of the electron type clones that attempt to be better, like Tauri.
The point isn't that electron is so awful. It's that the company with the purportedly best coding AI and one of the best overall AI models in the world chose to do the absolute tawdriest, cheapest, even laziest thing without any consideration of what the right thing to do might be, or what thing they could do that demonstrated their excellence and mastery of craft, or at a bare minimum, the advanced capabilities of the AI.
Cursor used claude to build a browser from scratch; it's not like their AI couldn't do it.
Who’s got the rebuttal to this?
React was an instant hit because it had the facebook brand behind it and everyone was tired of angular. But ultimately, react has worse outcomes for developers, users, and businesses. On the web, react websites are bloating. They run slower, their javascript payloads are larger, and they take longer to load.
Your suggestion -- that it works and then it gets more efficient later -- would make sense if we lived in a world where react moved off the virtual dom model. A virtual dom is a fine first attempt or prototype but we can do better. We know how. Projects like SolidJS do do better. React has not caught up, but it is still very popular. This whole "It worked badly, but it worked. Later came efficiency" thing is complete nonsense.
And there are loads of businesses that started off with an angular app, started to migrate to react, then started to migrate to react hooks, now switching to whatever the latest methodology is. Time and again you find these products, always endlessly migrating to the new thing, most of them never finishing a migration before beginning a new one. So these products end up being a chimera of four different frameworks held together with pain.
This isn't a good outcome for businesses, or for users, and it's not a good developer experience. react is stagnant and surviving off of being the default or the status quo and supported by tech companies that have long since stopped innovating and subsist on rent seeking. Developers choose react because nobody was ever fired for buying IBM and because they can look busy at their job, and because they buy a new phone and laptop every year with the latest hardware that can compensate for the deteriorating software they ship.
Ok, but why was everyone tired of Angular? Sure, web frameworks are examples of Fad Driven Development to the extreme, but Angular.js, was pure unmitigated ARSE.
Made ten bindings on a page? That's 100 cross connections. Made 100 two-way bindings? that's 10000 connections.
Clicked one way through fields A, B then started typing, they show same data. Clicked through fields A and C, now they are bound but B isn't. Clicked B then C, congrats all three of your bindings suddenly start filling in.
It was a combination of shitty performance scaling and unintuitive Angular data flow that primed everyone for React to take over.
It is better for something to not exist than for a shitty version to exist. Software doesn't get better over time, it gets worse. If you make a bad, suboptimal choice today chances are that solution becomes permanent. It's telling that all of your examples of increasing efficiency are not software.
If are aren't going to do it well, don't do it.
The UI wrapper then could be Electron, or something a little more platform-native you hand off to some junior engineers.
Are you sure it wasn't just an unfamiliarity with Java errors in general?
Clojure popped out of the _senior_ Java camp. It often lives within that mindshare.
In my opinion that is the true reason why the old native software was developed to such a high standard. But then once online stores and shrink wrap agreements made it impossible to return buggy software, then the financial incentives shifted towards shipping a partially broken product.
Who cares about pleasing with good performance when you can instead keep customers hostage?
Most of those Electron folks would not manage to even write C applications on an Amiga, use Delphi, VB, or whatever.
Educated on node and do not know anything else.
Even doing a TUI seems like a revelation to current generations, something quite mudane and quite common on 1980's text based computing of Turbo Vision, Clipper and curses.
I understand why, but there is such beauty in the simplicity of ansi.
Uphill both ways, should be easy for a company doing C compilers with LLMs.
The approach runs slower than a game written directly in assembly, but the cost to port to different architectures is much lower.
Sort of like Electron trades off native performance and look-and-feel to make multi-platform apps much more achievable.
IMO the OS vendors failed everyone by refusing to even attempt to agree on a common API for UI development, paving the way for web browsers to become the real OS and, ultimately, embedded browsers to be the affordable and practical way to be cross platform.
There's also stuff like lorca which shells out to an installed Chromium browser.
But I think even there it’s possible to encounter platform-dependent bugs - starting from view issues (you know, different OS can use different browser engines) and up to those related to system APIs.
Go figure what would happen when Chrome gets shipped everywhere, because writing browser agnostic code is too hard.
You just need to point it in the right direction (c/rust/go etc) and be harsh with the requirements, especially memory usage.
If I was Microsoft I would use AI for this rather than badly embedding AI everywhere, a lot of power users would be overwhelmed by a win 11 update where OS apps/features dropped mem usage by 90%+
Oh wait no that would be incredibly painful for everyone. Yes reducing memory requirements would be great but not at that cost.
And JavaScript is very good at backwards compatibility when you remove the churn of frameworks (unfortunately Electron doesn't guarantee compatibility quite as far back)
I do realise the need for abstractions and they do exist, provided there is actually the interest to learn them.
Compared to the web stack and Electron, native GUI APIs are complete shit. Both for the programmer, but also for the user.
Reactive UI (in the sense of React, Vue, ...), the greatest innovation in UI programming ever, was made popular by web-people.
Unless you write some ultra-high performance app like a Browser, a CAD app, a music production app, it doesn't make any sense to use native GUIs. Takes longer to program, the result is uglier and with less features. And for those ultra high performance apps you don't use the native UI toolkit anyway, you program your own widgets since the native ones are dog shit and slow.
They tried to replace our Qt GUI at work in this space with a react based one, the new UI ran like utter shit comparatively, even after a lot of effort was spent on optimisation.
Also, most of the world don't use high end developer laptops. Most of the world is the developing world, where phone apps on low end Android phones reign supreme.
React is no innovation at all, some folks got a bit enthusiastic with Haskell reactive programming papers.
No way someone really used Delphi and claims that it is faster to build UI with HTML/CSS/JS stack.
Best time I ever had in a job was writing WPF applications in C# using ReactiveUI. Once we really understood the underlying model we were plugging stuff together so easily. It is a really good model, but I can't see how React is a good example of it.
Of course I had lots to complain about then, WPF had bugs, C# has a number of big problems, but it was, overall, very nice.
Electron is very easy to deliver a good quality app for everything but absolute power users.
Yes it's horribly slow but it enables rapid experimentation and it's easy to deliver the wide range of UI integrations you are likely to want in a chat-esq experience.
Doing more work for no reason is stupid even if you the have money of a small nation.
The inevitable differences between platforms you get with all native everything isn’t a good user experience, either. Now you need to duplicate your documentation and support pages and have support staff available to address every platform. And what’s the payoff? Saving 80MB of RAM? Gaining milliseconds of latency that Joe Business will never notice as he’s hunt and pecking his way through the interface?
I thought we were done with Electron hate articles. It’s so 2018 to complain about it. It’s like talking about millennials and their skinny jeans. Yawn.
And if MS stopped randomly moving things around in the UI with no benefit whatsoever, their documentation could be usefull instead of telling me where I could find some setting 3 years ago.
Someone needed actual malice to write that monster.
Don't use Discord, never plan to. Even if I cared, I would only use the browser as it should be.
Slack only lives on the browser, as it should.
VSCode is only used when there are no SDKs for my editors or IDEs, and I am forced into VSCode.
However contrary to Electron crap, VSCode at least has tons of external processes written in a mix of C++, Rust and C#, and parts of it have moved into WebGL, not the traditional Electron crap application.
Ironic statement, given that Claude Code is exactly that.
So maybe Claude could have used another cross-platform desktop development framework, but Electron was better/faster.
https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi
One of the related conferences just took place last October,
I've been in a few companies that managed to eke out a living by maintaining a piece of software no one in their sane mind would still maintain. Sometimes a government gig, sometimes the private sector.
Shoutout to my boys that in 2018 maintained a Java 1.3 app. Still going strong to this day (it was migrated to Java 8 last time I checked).
EDIT: ~21 Delphi apps in world! Woohoo! Delphi number #525
> Most of those Electron folks would not manage to even write C applications on an Amiga, use Delphi, VB, or whatever.
It's not just the difficulty. It's the lack of learning materials, widgets, examples, and whatnot. Debuggers also suck, at least they did when I used Delphi.
What also helps is having a huge behemoth of a corporation improving your GUI toolkit for free (Chromium, although you pay in ad exposure).
> The real problem is a lack of care. And the slop; you can build it with any stack.
so you agree.
The sad reality is everyone wanting to have fancy looking pages/apps as quickly and easily as possible.
And now, the web (and increasingly desktop) is littered with the lowest common denominator of platforms with all sorts of crazy optimizations that still can’t be as snappy as a Windows 95 app on a 200mhz / 16MB desktop.
At this point we may as well just use electron and nodejs for fighter jets and missile defense systems. Surely it’s fast enough for that, too.
Electron is bad, but it's the least bad of all other cross-platform GUIs.
> Most of those Electron folks would not manage to even write C applications on an Amiga, use Delphi, VB, or whatever.
That's true of most people on the planet. No one has access to them.
I’ve built for Electron and did a course on Swift for macOS apps. Not out of laziness, but I don’t think I’d ever build native for Macs. And the Windows folk have been complaining for a long time about the native APIs.
Now, native on mobile, that’s something else. I’ve been stuck on RN/Expo because that’s what the resources the business had allowed for, but native Kotlin is much more enjoyable (AFAIK). Swift… dunno, still icky.
"Looks could be good, but they also can be bad, and then you are stuck with platform-consistent, but generally bad UI (Liquid Glass ahem)."
Since the discussion was specifically about platform-consistency, odd that the author would decide that personal taste might take priority over platform-consistency.
"It changes too often, too: the app you made today will look out of place next year, when Apple decides to change look and feel yet again."
Seems to be arguing the exact opposite? If you adopt a native API for controls, windows, etc., your app will change next year to look completely in place (perhaps for better or worse according to the author).
Going DIY on UI and your app might still, in 2026, have brushed aluminum and "lickable" buttons.
This mentality creates a worse experience for end users because all applications have their own conventions and no one wants to be dictated to what good UX is. The best UX in every single instance I've encountered is consistency. Sure, some old UIs were obtuse (90% weren't) but they were obtuse in predictable ways that someone could reasonably navigate. The argument here is between platform consistency and application consistency. Should all apps on the platform look the same, or should the app look the same on all platforms?
edit: grammar
IMO that’s a fairly strong argument that the branding was always unnecessary, and apps would have been better off built from a common set of UI components following uniform human interface guidelines.
> No one wants to compromise on design.
While I agree that consistency is hugely important, I have also seen a lot of cases where it made the UX worse. The reason is that, unfortunately, UX isn't so simple. There isn't a single UX rule that is always true. UX design rules (best practices, guidelines, or principles) are a good starting point, but in a lot of situations multiple rules are conflicting each other. UI/UX design is dealing with tradeoffs most of the time. Good designer will know when breaking a specific rule will actually improve the UX.
Consistency is very important, but sometimes a custom UI element will be the best tool for the job. For example, imagine UI for seat selection in a movie theater ticket booking app. A consistent design would mean using standard controls users are already familiar with, but no standard control will provide high quality UX in this situation (not without heavy modifications).
But I still I agree with you that a lot of bad UX is due to inconsistency. There needs to be a good reason each time consistency broken and often it is broken for the wrong reasons.
On one hand I also lament the amount of hardware-potential wastage that occurs with deep stacks of abstractions. On the other hand, I've evolved my perspective into feeling that the medium doesn't really matter as much as the result... and most software is about achieving a result. I still take personal joy in writing what I think is well-crafted code, and I also accept that that may become more niche as time goes on.
To me this shift from software-as-craft to software-as-bulk-product has some similarities to the "pets vs cattle" mindset change when thinking about server / process orchestration and provisioning.
Then also on the dismay of JS becoming even more entrenched as the lingua franca. There's every possibility that in a software-as-bulk-product world, LLM-driven development could land on a safer language due to efficiency gains from e.g. static type checking. Economically I wonder if an adoption of a different lingua franca could manifest by way of increasing LLM development speed / throughput.
Why does an LLM need to produce human readable code at all? Especially in a language optimized around preventing humans from making human mistakes. For now, sure, we're in the transitional period, but in the long run? Why?
"It has been lost in AI money-grabbing frenzy but a few years ago we were talking a lot about AIs being “legible”, that they could explain their actions in human-comprehensible terms. “Running code we can examine” is the highest grade of legibility any AI system has produced to date. We should not give that away.
"We will, of course. The Number Must Go Up. We aren’t very good at this sort of thinking.
"But we shouldn’t."
Assuming that after the transitional period it will still be humans working with ai tools to build things where humans actually add value to the process. Will the human+ai where the ai can explain what the ai built in detail and the human leverages that to build something better, be more productive that the human+ai where the human does not leverage those details?
That 'explanation' will be/can act as the human readable code or the equivalent. It does not need to be any coding language we know today however. The languages we have today are already abstractions and generalizations over architectures, OSs, etc and that 'explanation' will be different but in the same vein.
If you take your question and look into the future, you might consider the existence of an LLM specifically trained to take high-level language inputs and produce machine code. Well, we already have that technology: we call it a compiler. Compilers exist, are (frequently) deterministic, and are generally exceedingly good at their job. Leaving this behind in favor of a complete English -> binary blob black box doesn't make much sense to me, logically or economically.
I also think there is utility in humans being able to read the generated output. At the end of the day, we're the conscious ones here, we're the ones operating in meatspace, and we're driving the goals, outputs, etc. Reading and understanding the building blocks of what's driving our lives feels like a good thing to me. (I don't have many well-articulated thoughts about the concept of singularity, so I leave that to others to contemplate.)
If we do enough passes of synthetic or goal-based training of source code generation, where the models are trained to successfully implement things instead of imitating success, then we may see new programming paradigms emerge that were not present in any training data. The "new language" would probably not be a programming language (because we train on generating source FOR a language, not giving it the freedom to generate languages), but could be new patterns within languages.
- declarative-ish UI in typescript with react
- rust backend for performance-sensitive operations
- I can run a python sidecar, bundled with the app, that lets me use python libraries if I need it
If I can and it makes sense to, I'll pull functionality into rust progressively, but this give me a ton of flexibility and lets me use the best parts of each language/platform.
Its fast too and doesn't use a ton of memory like electron apps do.
I had to add strict ESLint and TypeScript rules to keep guardrails on the coding agents.
However, there are still some rough edges that have been annoying to work with. I think for my next project I will actually go back to electron. There are two issues that caused me pain:
1. I can't use Playwright to run e2e tests on the tauri app itself. That's because the webview doesn't expose the Chrome DevTools Protocol, and the tauri-driver [2] does not work on MacOS.
2. Security Scoped Resources aren't fully implemented which means if a user gets the app through the app store the app won't be able to remember file permissions between runs [3]. It's not too much of an issue since I probably won't release it on the app store, but still annoying.
But I hope Tauri continues to grow and we start seeing apps use it more.
I tried Uno Platform and AvaloniaUI last year but I had similar problems there with external drag 'n' drop not working on Wayland and the difficulty in writing your own advanced components of which there are oodles to choose from using React/Vue/Solid/Svelte.
I'm not rewriting that other app in Electron, so for Tauri (the development of which largely seems to have stalled?) I'm hoping this[1] will solve my Linux hurdles. Going to try that branch out.
[1]: https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/pull/12491
And this is just desktop Linux. I used to care about Windows but stopped building for that.
I don't think it's that native has nothing to offer. I think that developing (in case of desktop) for 3 different platforms all with own complication of what is native UI is a nightmare. macos has swiftui (incomplete), uikit and appkit, linux in practice gtk/qt, windows winui 3 (fundamentally broken) with WPF and WinForms still hanging around .
Wouldn’t it be a good use of AI to port the same app to several native platforms?
Sublime Text feels so much snappier than VSCode, for another example. And I can leave it running for weeks without it leaking memory.
I get it, but this is a bit dramatic.
One of the biggest challenges I've found with using non-native tools (and specifically the various frameworks that let you write JavaScript that compile to Native code) is that there is much less of a guarantee that the 3rd party solution will continue support for new OS versions. There's much less of a risk with that with 1st party solutions.
Additionally, those 3rd parties are always chasing the 1st part vendor for features. Being far behind the regular cadence of releases can be quite inconvenient, despite any advantages initially gained.
> Native APIs are terrible to use, and OS vendors use everything in their power to make you not want to develop native apps for their platform.
Disagree. I'm most familiar with Windows and Android - but native apps on those platforms, snd also on Mac, look pretty good when using the default tools and libraries. Yes, its possible to use (say) material design and other ux-overkill approaches on native, but thats a choice just like it us for web apps.
And OS vendors are very much incentivised to make natuve development as easy and painless as possible - because lock-in.
> That explains the rise of Electron before LLM times,
Disagree. The "rise of Electron" is due to the economics of skill-set convergence on JS, the ubiquity of the JS/HTML/CSS/Node stack platform, and many junior developers knowing little or nothing else.
As for the rest: minor variations in traffic light positioning and corner radii are topical but hardly indicators of decaying platorms.
with all due respect - hard disagree. in what place on Earth to Junior Devs make these types of decisions?? Or decision makers going “we got these Juniors that know JS so it is what is…”
Maybe if there was a toss-up between X and Y or something like that but to flat-out pick Electron because you have people that knows JS is madness
Native apps are not bad to develop when using Swift or C#, they are nice to use and their UI frameworks are fine, it's just that it requires a separate team. With Electron you need much less, simple as that.
> As for the rest: minor variations in traffic light positioning and corner radii are topical but hardly indicators of decaying platorms.
I think it shows how important the platform itself is to the company. The system settings app on macOS is literally slow to change the topic (the detail page is updated like ~500ms after clicking).
I personally love to develop desktop apps but business-wise they rarely make sense these days.
Electron is a native wrapper for web content. The wrapper is still native.
> Native APIs are terrible to use, and OS vendors use everything in their power to make you not want to develop native apps for their platform.
I'm honestly not quite sure what the author means here.
Web APIs are equally “terrible” in my opinion. In any case, you have to release an Electron app on Mac the same way you release any native app on Mac. The benefit of using web APIs is not that they are non-terrible but that you can share the same code as your website. And of course you can more easily find web developers than native developers. But that has nothing to do with whether or not the API is terrible. It’s just supply and demand.
I’ll take AppKit and autolayout any day over CSS, ugh. CSS is the worst.
I just checked: No, the corner radius is different. I'm personally not very bothered by that, but it's just empirically true.
> Electron is a native wrapper for web content. The wrapper is still native.
In my view, the problem isn't that it's a wrapper, but rather that it's that it's a bad wrapper of a bad runtime (i.e. the incredibly bloated JS/web stack).
It may depend on which SDK version the developer uses.
Separate from that, Apple doesn't seem to mind breaking native macOS apps, to the point where most devs treat native code like a liability on Mac but ok on Windows.
To read ePubs, however, I was able to write a PWA leveraging epub.js because no native APIs were required.
Tangentially, even native can be badly designed and developed, performance wise. Even Apple hasn’t been able to do a good job with the Reminders app (one of the several apps ported to Mac with the same level of negligence that Electron brings in). I use a lot of Reminders and lists in Reminders. It’s janky and poorly coded.
So, naturally, the ecosystem adapted, shifting all of these inconveniences into a lower layer and calling it Electron. Pragmatically, they latched onto whatever was available that just worked, and since Google spends billions making sure that Chromium remains dominant, so their upsells on YouTube and Gmail remain dominant, so their ad platform remains dominant, they just used that.
Though I haven't tested it too much other than building small personal tools like a work habit tracker, it's very well documented and looks great. Gave me a good excuse to try the language again as well.
[0]: https://www.gpui.rs/
I'm not sure this is true. Cocoa remains one of the most amazing libraries ever. Delphi's VCL is the same (Win32, ugh, but the VCL is native, and it's wonderful.)
The difference perhaps is that you need to re-implement. And there is a very good question: if AI boosts productivity so much, why is this not now being done even by AI companies?
I suspect the reason is not that it's not possible, but that native user experience is not a value. Since circa 2012 (the loss of Aqua, Windows 8) native UI as a driving force in user experience by OS vendors lost value; the web replaced it with different UIs per site/app; and the OS experience of generic, boring UI meant that the OS receded into the background. It's only folks who experienced what good OS-driven UI was that value it, and I worry that they don't have a voice.
But Anthropic could, if they chose, demonstrate the value of their AI productivity extremely effectively by building a native version of Claude Desktop for Win/Mac/Linux. And they might do some good for design/engineering trends around UX at the same time as well.
Hahaha
Hahahahaha
Are you having a laugh? Every electron app I have ever used uses at least half a dozen heavy weight processes, each using 100MB+, typically totalling multi-GB for a single app - regardless of complexity.
Native apps are more work and I agree that OS vendors can't seem to decide on visuals these days, but they are still are far superior option for performance and efficiency.
And with RAM prices through the roof, the last thing I want is another bloated Electron app....
Throughout history we've only gotten more efficient with our technology and it's resources. Software might be the only field where it went the opposite. Now we are insulting users on low end hardware?
The same thing I did well on a 2GB ram windows 7 machine is a latency nightmare on a 16GB windows 11. The same exact task with the same results.
Don't want to completely hate electron. VS Code proved it can be done in a good way, teams showed us the opposite. Like the author said you can build slop in any stack: JS or native it doesn't matter. What matters is care.
This entire industry is cursed with people who don't give a shit, in it for a quick buck, are entitled and lazy. Maybe AI should destroy everything anyway. We had better software when we gatekept who can build it.
I'm certainly not trying to be insulting, but these threads do get more than a bit tiresome. There's very little curiosity in them towards understanding why Electron is so popular; maybe a tendency lately of HN to assume that popular things are bad, or that large companies do things exclusively for the wrong reasons.
Efficiency is coming up a lot in this thread, and almost universally without definition, because the people making claims about it are implied to be measuring the efficiency of the same thing: how fast your software can run on the least possible hardware. But efficiency can also describe how you use time, which as they say is the one thing you can't ever have more of. Or money, which is also rarely infinite.
In this thread I see takes like:
- "They're a huge company, they can afford to do it native!" (or they can write it once across 3 OS and the browser, and spend the time on other things)
- "Electron has bad performance!" (non-native performance isn't the same thing as bad performance, using more RAM than you think it should consume isn't automatically bad performance)
- "The UI is inconsistent with native apps!" (take it up with product and design, remember Skype? Or AIM)
Electron isn't going to take over the bare-metal powerhouse app space anytime soon, but that's not why anyone builds anything with it. It saves dev time, it makes the economics of bothering to support Linux desktop users make sense, most actual customers have more RAM than they need anyway, and you can still call out to native code for the perf sensitive parts.
Like you and the article said it's about caring. There are definitely bad Electron apps. There are bad programmers at every level between the user and the metal. But the scapegoating on here is so predictable I could have predicted half the responses in this thread with my eyes closed given only the title of the article and some of them are borderline against the guidelines in how little they further discussion. I at least hoped my comment was funny, even if it didn't add much either.
I definitely agree regarding the state of the industry as far as performance and care for the user goes across the board, even with the hotrod hardware we have access to now. Maybe it was inevitable with scale and time and I do lament that it's harder to economically justify cranking the most possible out of the hardware. With my original comment I mostly meant to convey a joking exasperation that these threads are rarely even about real profiling or real-world tradeoffs that make for interesting discussion anymore but just rote "Electron bad".
Screw the rest and if every app is an electron app that’s not true at all. It works if few apps are Electron apps
> and you can still call out to native code for the perf sensitive part
What is rarely done
It’s just another reason why computer get faster and faster but apps don’t.
Thanks to electron apps I can type faster than the program reacts and sometimes it even misses a key.
Did never happen on a desktop app
If you've never had a native app skip or a key or lag because you typed too fast, I don't know what to tell you. I've used some real garbage production software written entirely in God's own C that had those problems. I have twelve instances of VSCode open right now, some with huge projects, and cumulatively they're taking up less than 2GB of memory. It's just throwing stones in the wrong direction to put this blame on Electron at this point.
> They're a huge company, they can afford to do it native!"
They are an AI company, the AI could let it write native
Devs having no time is an obsolete argument
And unless there've been recent advances in longevity I'm not aware of, individual human devs still have a fixed amount of time on this earth, and there's no end in sight to the demand for software even if we 1000x the speed we can build it at today. They can spend it doing other things instead of futzing around prematurely optimizing chat apps.
I can’t go "look it built a browser from scratch" and "look it built a compiler" to "sorry, native apps are complicated"
You and I both know that AI today can't really build a browser or compiler from scratch on par with the cumulative human work put into Chrome or GCC. You could just as easily side-eye these companies like "well, if your AI is so good, why doesn't it build its own hardware and OS and run on that?". Even if they could, why would they do that except as a proof of concept? It'd still be more work and more time for no benefit at all to their customers or their business.
Now even the good programmers don't give a fuck. Software development is now about burnishing one's resume and hoping for a massive payday instead of making stuff that's useful.
That changed. The following generation was still taught by those original folks, but they came up with a mythos around it.
Right now on my machine, 5 whole docker containers, including two DBs and 3 dev servers, are taking up less RAM than Cursor, a glorified text editor.
And have you looked at RAM prices lately? It's possible that 8GB is all some people can afford.
But there is no way the convergence on web technologies is not a market failure of some kind. The platform is not even that great to develop for! It's full of weird edge cases, unnecessary build steps and slow iteration cycles. Not even speaking of the often superflous frameworks and huge dependency trees which don't do much of anything.
You could build systems with much better devx and ux and an order of maginitude less memory usage and wasted CPU cycles. A bunch of such systems have been built over the years: e.g. Common Lisp + Comemrcial Tooling, Smalltalk Systems.
And real users perceive software as slow and buggy and generally crap. Just talk with your nontechnical relatives what their opinion is of the software we have inflicted upon their daily lives.
it’s about cost. develop once, deploy everywhere. web solved that. web devs are a dime-a-dozen (i’m not saying web dev is bad… just that it’s a saturated market) so the cost is already scraping the bottom of the barrel.
now, compare this to deploying native apps, we need:
- a macOS dev/team
- a windows dev/team
- a linux dev/team
- a web dev/team
- testers for each of those platforms
- coordination between the teams so the UI looks consistent
that’s a 4-5x larger staff
AI is a force multiplier, sure.. but it’s not a 10x force multiplier. it’s 2x at best, but probably 1.5x in practice (and averaged across the board).
Of course, the React ecosystem and community is enormous. I bet if I was building something complex, I would have gotten frustrated building it all from scratch in SwiftUI when I could just reach for a React component library.
Making five different apps just to claim "native" doesn't seem like a great choice, and obviously for now, delivering new claude features takes priority over a native graphics framework, so electron makes sense. But that doesn't mean it'll be on electron forever.
It’s absolutely achievable if you give a shit about your products and I’m long over hearing the bevy of usual fucking excuses from software houses often magnitudes larger than us who struggle to even keep their electron shit working correctly.
How about Java Swing? It's already battle tested and deployed everywhere you have Java.
I guess we just shouldn't even try. Obviously the web is a good platform for some apps and a terrible one for others.
Sure, native applications can be hard and slow to develop for a number of reasons, but OS vendors are seriously incentivized to have developers build on their platform.
Cocoa is excellent but who knows when Apple will deprecate it for SwiftUI (which is not very good yet, if it ever will be)?
Windows is a disaster of half-finished APIs. Win32 doesn't even support dark mode. Windows Forms was on life support for ages and only now is getting some love, but it doesn't have a native look despite being built on Win32. WPF is stuck on DirectX 9 and was also on life support for a long time. UWP is dead, effectively. WinUI3 requires bundling 38MB worth of DLLs (many DLLs), is a pain to install and setup a project with and somehow performs worse than electron apps (don't look at the callstack when you click a button, it is scarier than RE9).
And Linux... well there's Qt which really wants you to drop QtWidgets and use QtQuick instead that nobody likes, and GTK is actively developer hostile with a severe disdain for backwards compatibility.
Ultimately, Claude having limitations is an issue. They can't just point it at the code base and ask it to make it faster.
But overall yeah, from a compatibility perspective, nothing beats Electron. I'm not sure we'd ever get an official Discord client on Linux otherwise.
1. locked up files ==> that's for security, which wasn't an issue in the 1990s.
2. inconsistent look ==> people are embedding browsers inside apps for all sorts of reasons, ruining the "native" UI/UX even if the OS "look" were stable.
It took a while, but once again open source and the web kinda won, though if you like consistency, then I agree it's a pyrrhic victory...
JIT and AoT translation like Rosetta can make it almost native. Trimming out the middle of the stack will make it in practice be faster than almost anything out there today.
I think this might be wildly incompatible with the business models of most big corporations, because if this is done well, there can be true portable apps. The core operating system can dissolve into something even less exciting then the BIOS. Or perhaps there can be genuince technical innovation in the OS space, supporting a universal new canvas.
I've also been playing with a "bare metal" "gui toolkit/compositor", and wow is it fast, buttery smooth, and uses almost no resources. I don't know that even with LLMs I'll be able to pull it off myself in any meaningful way, but if I'm doing it, maybe some other people are too.
Electron can be pretty performant if written well. The difference between Electron and native is that Electron you can write sloppily (more common) or performant, whereas it's in the nature of native to force you down the performant path (which expends a lot more time).
People used to joke about new Javascript frameworks, now with AI things are changing even faster and you really think it's worth investing time into a native app for something whose features are rapidly expanding and changing? That's bad software management.
If they're doing stupid things in terms of performance then by all means they should fix that but Electron isn't inherently bad.
But who cares ?
Electron Apps are cute. A really really ugly looking native application won't have all that nice CSS.
Cross platform development is significantly faster with Electron.
The only ones complaining have the know how to use cli Claude code so, side from a few bloggers no has an issue with this.
It can even create a beautiful Java Swing apps.
Start times are atrocious, long conversations literally break rendering (and I’m using the desktop app on a MacBook Pro with an M3 Pro CPU and 36 GB of RAM so an electron app shouldn’t feel so janky so frequently, right?).
IMHO they just don’t care right now (and I get it from their perspective) but I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of low hanging fruit they could fix to make the experience 5x or even 10x smoother. Claude Code (TUI) is also another memory hog and I’ve even had Ghostty literally crash with enough open sessions.
Fortunately Anthropic models are also incredibly so at least I’ve been able to speedrun my own desktop client using Tauri and fix many of the issues I encounter every day. I might release it at some point.
That's just mythical past, in reality you had the full variety of garbage with basic things broken (hello, blurry native text if poor users decide to adjust screen resolution to match his vision, and text is the most basic of the basics of UI). Only today many of those issues are wrapped in a browsers, so many times more inefficient (though, to be fair, making it harder to mess some of the basics through a concentration of dev efforts on one platform)
> the more apps used native look and feel, the better user experience was across apps
This is especially atrociously deep one, that default look of Windows was ugly and the feel - unergonomic, and user experience doesn't magically become better if you stick to the ugliness. And for important productivity apps it also doesn't become better if you stick to the unergonomic - as, you know, there are two sides in a coin, and "familiarity" isn't the only nor even the most important factor.
> The real reason is: native has nothing to offer.
It offers the same things it always has - the potential to be performant and integrated (with better baseline), just as OS god intended (but OS devil intervened) And the counter here is too shallow
> There’s no technical reason why
There is, bad abstractions that make it harder to be performant is a technical reason for poor performance.
> Web apps can be faster, too, but in practice, nobody cares.
Is just very shallow. "Can" is useless alone, you need to engage with all the other major factors that affect reality, not ignore everything at the level of a theoretical "can"
> What makes you think it’ll be different once the company decides to move to native?
Well, reality? There are literally the same companies with the same apps that were different before switching!
And yeah, it's terrible. Apple doesn't make good apps anymore.
(This is part of why I think electron does so well -- it's not as good as a really good native app [e.g. Sublime Text], but it's way better than the sort of default whatever you'll get doing native. You get a lot of niceness that's built into the web stack.)
Passwords works fine for me, Settings does display notorious lag loading icons, but Apple Music is by far the most disgustingly bad “native” app. Everything is slow on that one, everything takes ages to load, everything makes scrolling choke and stutter, everything even looks like a website crammed inside a desktop window, and to top it all off, the feature disparity between mobile and desktop is so large that you can still see remnants of iTunes floating around on desktop while still not being able to sync the entire condition-set of smart playlists between devices. It’s appalling.
But hey, Apple is a small company after all, they must lack the resources to make their once flagship service run decently on these powerful new chips.
My eyes! The goggles, they do nothing!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36060678
I really doubt that at this point. Developers have learned that everything Microsoft says to do for Windows, since 2012, will be garbage within a few years. Guaranteed.
Learned Silverlight for Windows Phone development? Too bad, it's UWP now. And the XAML is incompatible.
Learned WinRT for Windows 8/8.1 app development? Too bad, it's UWP now. And the XAML is incompatible.
Packaged your App for APPX? Too bad, it's MSIX now.
You learned how to develop UWP apps? Too bad, the User Interface layer has been ripped out of UWP, it's now called WinUI 3, and it doesn't even run on UWP. Better port your UWP app back to Win32 now, I guess. Why did you even learn UWP again?
You went and learned WinUI 3 like we recommended? Well, unlike WinUI 2, it doesn't have a visual designer, and it doesn't have input validation, or a bunch of other WinUI 2 features. So, depending on what your app needs, you might have a mix of UWP and Win32, because WinUI 2 is UWP-exclusive and WinUI 3 is Win32-exclusive and neither has all the features of the other. Progress!
You built your Windows 8 app with WinJS? Well, sucks to be you, rewrite it in entirety, WinJS was scrapped.
You ported your app from iOS with Project Islandwood? Well, again, that sucks. It was brilliant, it made pulling apps over from iOS much easier, but it's dead. Rewrite!
You decided to hang it all, develop for good old WPF, but wanted to use the Ink Controls from UWP? Great, we developed a scheme for that called XAML Islands which made so you could have some of the best UWP controls in your old app. Then we released WinUI 3, completely broke it, and made it so complicated nobody can figure it out. So broken; even the Windows Team doesn't use it and is writing the modern Windows components for File Explorer with the old version.
But of course, that would require WinUI 2, for UWP, inside Win32 which is the main feature of the broken WinUI 3; which means that the Windows Team has a bastardized version of XAML Islands for their own use that nobody else has (literally), to modernize the taskbar and File Explorer and built-in apps like Paint, that nobody who wants to emulate them can borrow. Their apps don't look modern and their users complain? Suckers, go learn WinUI 3, even though our own teams couldn't figure it out.
You wanted your app on the Microsoft Store? Well, good news, package it together with this obtuse script that requires 30 command-line arguments, perfect file path formats, and a Windows 10 Pro License! Oh, you didn't do that? Do it 5 years later with MSIX and a GUI this time! Oh, you didn't do that? Forget the packaging, just submit a URL to your file download location. Anyone who bothered with the packaging wasted hours for no real purpose.
Did I mention Xamarin? A XAML dialect of its own, that supports all platforms. But it runs on Mono instead of the authentic .NET, so you'd better... work around the quirks. Also it's called MAUI now, and runs on .NET now. But that might break a few things so hang around for over a year's worth of delays. We'll get it running for sure!
Oh, and don't forget about ARM! The first attempt to get everyone to support ARM was in 2012 with a Windows version called... No, no, no. Go past this. Pass this part. In fact, never play this again. (If you want to imagine pain, imagine running Windows and Microsoft Office on a ARM CPU that came three generations before the Tegra X1 in the Nintendo Switch. Surface RT ended with a $900M write-off.)
And so on...
Or, you could just ignore everything, create a Windows Forms (22 years strong) or WPF app (17 years strong), and continue business like usual. Add in DevExpress or Telerik controls and you are developing at the speed of light. And if you need a fancier UI, use Avalonia, Electron, React, or Flutter.
It's the incentives and everything is a trade off. Time to market, performance, features: none of these choices are made in a vacuum. Oh, and people like to go home and see their families once in a while.
As a developer of over 35 years, I feel like I hear the same arguments over and over again. "Programmers used to care about performance!" No they didn't, they just had no choice because computers sucked and you had to work on performance or your application would barely run. "Progammers used to care about the quality of their code!" Really. You apparently never worked on legacy systems with years of hacks and spaghetti code that took an afternoon to trace through just to figure out what it was doing.
People haven't changed. Kids aren't lazier these days. The incentives are always just to ship as fast as possible. Performance will be dealt with when and if it is so bad that the customer complains and not a moment sooner.
When I was much younger I fancied myself a "craftsman" of software. But any "craft" I was able to bestow on my software was in spite of the surrounding incentives not because of them. Software is closer to assembly line work than craftsmanship and LLMs are just driving that point home faster and harder than ever.
I still love software development after all these years but it's entirely because I love solving problems and computers still fascinate me the same as they did when I got my first TRS-80 Color Computer at age seven. Nobody that's not a programmer cares as long as the software does what they need it to and does fast enough that they don't start wonder why they have to use this piece of crap software in the first place.
all the kids in schools with their chromebooks and whatnots? - oh well, they can tell their parents to get you an MBP :)
Electron apps dealing with more than a small handful of data rapidly start to show poor frame timing and input lag.
Electron and web technology generally is certainly more performant than it once was, and I think people do malign Electron specifically a bit too much. VS Code continues to be the anti-example. It's always rather surprising it's just a web view, even on lower end hardware. (A several year old raspberry pi for example)
(Please note, I said "surprising it's just a web view", not "it's more performant than it could be if built differently".)
I think the main difference people tend to experience is a lack of care. I would say, for reasons I am NOT sure are causal, electron apps do seem to tend towards worse experiences on average in my experience. I think on the web, a quick flash of unstyled content or that ghost of the element you accidentally dragged instead of clicked are seen as just minor issues, because they're expectations of the web. If things go REALLY wrong, I have a whole rock solid toolbar above the app that lets me refresh if I think I'm in some infinite loop, or the URL bar I can look at if I'm not sure what page I was just redirected to. The back button promises to return me to where I was before. The browser is caging-in applications for me, so it's fine if they're a bit rowdy.
But using an application that is pretending to NOT be a web browser, seeing any web-quirk feels like I'm staring at rusted rebar in a cracked concrete bridge. The bridge still works, but now I'm aware of the internals of it and maybe that makes me feel a little more uneasy about standing on it. There is no back button if something goes wrong, and if there is, the app itself is rendering it. It's of course possible to hide that reality from me, but you need to care about sealing up all the cracks that let me see the rowdy internals.
To be fair, maybe that's just me that feels that way. And I do rather like the JS ecosystem.
It can't die soon enough. Doesn't all have to be Electron, but web tech for the win and force everything to the browser unless you'd like to write it twice.