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Comment by Culonavirus | Hacker News Reader

That is not why people use Electron. The goal is not and never was to just be a "UI toolkit" and "adopting UI patterns from their host OS".

Chromium has so much stuff packed into it, its insane. All that utility comes with Electron. And that's a good thing.

If you ever worked with video, for example, you know that having the full power of a modern browser in a desktop app is a game changer. Video playback (not to mention transcoding, which is also possible with modern web and webcodecs) is a complex beast, implementing that yourself is massive undertaking, not to mention in a desktop app that is supposed to work on win/mac/lin. I've built apps with Electron in tens of hours that would otherwise take me tens of days or more (and thats with AI because I'm not a video expert).

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gstreamer is not that complicated

It has a really really crappy security record, though.

Those issues are typically from the decoding libraries you choose. Which could even be ffmpeg if you wish. GStreamer just provides a nice high level API.

Electron doesn't?

Last time I checked there's a small industry of gstreamer contractors, so it's not that simple.

chromium is basically operating system at this point, it lacks kernel and ability to boot independently (added in chromium os), which is both good (from abilities standpoint) and bad (when copy of chromium is bundled with every app that renders webform with text field and button and nothing else)

when it goes about using webapps as desktop apps, native PWA support should be used, it would - in theory at least - lessen most issues electron apps have but will need extra effort and that's why we can't have nice things (like RAM free for other tasks)

> chromium is basically operating system at this point

I get what you're trying to say, but Chromium is far from being an OS. What you could say is, Chromium is as complex as an OS, or is replacing the OS in providing functional libraries atop devices (OS-provided application framework, if you will).

You are correct. Notwithstanding, people have been expressing the gp's sentiment for like a decade now [1] as is evident in this sub-thread [2], so it's a losing battle trying to prevent people from making such comparisons.

1: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14733829

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14736498

> Just as a data point - Chrome has more code than the linux kernel -

> It's an operating system (pretending to be a browser).

Chrome OS is literally an operating system that's 90% through chromium

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