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Every Electron app I tried halved my battery life. Sure, regular people won't complain about your electron "desktop" app, they'll just complain about crappy bat
by old-gregg 10y ago
Every Electron app I tried halved my battery life. Sure, regular people won't complain about your electron "desktop" app, they'll just complain about crappy batteries of their laptop, or about "my computer getting slow".
In fact, every time you hear a non-programmer complain about their computer it's usually not a hardware, but a software like electron that's ruining their experience.
OSes have started to add application profiling recently, so once every mainstream OS starts loudly pointing a finger at offensive applications (like "uninstall Spotify/Slack and you'll get 4 more hours of battery life"), you'll start hearing complaints from non-programmers.
- Hydraulix989 10y agoThis is absolutely the case. I can get literally double the battery life on my Thinkpad if I close Slack, Messenger for Desktop, Atom/VSCode. Chrome uses multiple extra watts of juice in powertop than Firefox, and every Electron.JS application is really just a Chrome instance.
- jones1618 10y agoI'm not sure about battery life but I was a huge fan of Slack (based on Electron) until I set it to run at startup. Before then I'd routinely have three Visual Studio instances, a SQL manager and Chrome running with 10 or 15 tabs open. No problem. Suddenly, I noticed my Windows machine would bog down with just one Visual Studio and take minutes to load Chrome. I was sure I had a virus. Actually, Task Manager showed 90% of my 8Gb ram being utilized and caching to disk constantly with most of the ram and CPU being hogged by eight(!) Slack threads. This is with Slack minimized and sitting idle. The fix was to replace the Slack/Electron app and use the browser version instead. That solved it. Electron is a super cool piece of tech that could enable all kinds of great app development but needs to go on a serious diet first.