8 ms·

> ... Electron applications are shite in comparison with proper native applications. Is that true from a user's perspective? The average user I know would not

by ballenf 10y ago

> ... Electron applications are shite in comparison with proper native applications. Is that true from a user's perspective? The average user I know would not have the idea that Slack is somehow inherently worse than say MS Word or any other truly native app they use everyday. What would Slack gain by integrating better with my Mac? Slack starts up too fast for me to read the little quotation (penultimate Macbook Pro). I actually wish it was slightly slower because I like those cheesy quotes when I can catch them. Everything feels almost instant. Not bash instant, but as fast as any mainstream messaging app. I leave it running all the time and get what feels like normal full hours upon hours of battery life. There are apps or browser tabs that I've noticed destroying battery life, but Slack nor Atom nor MS Visual code are on that list for me. The anti-Electron complaints all kind of feel like the same argument that comes up as each new layer of abstraction gains acceptance. I'm sure there's a lot that Electron can and should improve. Running multiple copies of Chrome does sound awful, but until I read that I didn't know the atrocities it was committing. Just doesn't feel productive to try to make Electron go away vs. working to improve it or create a better cross-platform abstraction.

brandon272 10y ago
Slack behaves perfectly fine for me and I don't have incredible hardware. It's non-Electron apps that are typically mentioned by macOS' energy management system as "consuming significant energy", in my experience. Edit: Mass downvotes; lol ... Just stating my personal experience!
_jal 10y ago
> Is that true from a user's perspective? It is for this user. > What would Slack gain by integrating better with my Mac? Far better resource management, one would hope, for starters. As the article pointed out, when you're measuring your IRC client's memory use in hundreds of megs, there's a problem. It isn't uncommon for me to need to choose which "essential" apps to turn off to get something done on a maxed-out MBP. So Slack gets turned off, and maybe someone gets annoyed that I don't respond to something, while I run a few VMs in Slack's former memory space. As far as other things, well, using a platform's capabilities as appropriate is generally considered good form - HCI concerns, and, generally, just people like things to be consistent. I don't know why we're supposed to forget this now. I personally don't care if Electron goes away or what, but to the extent that I'm forced to run Slack by my cow-orkers' choices, it sure would be nice if it were less of a bucket of ass.
- ballenf 10y ago
  Finally an argument that is concrete and understandable! Seriously, this is the first comment I've read that is tangible as opposed to theoretical. All the other complaints are on the basis of being morally offended by the ratio of resource usage vs. application functionality. The nice thing about slack is that it will run about anywhere. The app on my phone magically knows if the app is not running on my laptop and will then and only then send me notifications. But, I'm not suggesting this as a solution for you -- best productivity killer I know is having to pay attention to yet another device while trying to get work done. Depends on your environment, but I have of one very effective and successful coworker who just flat out refuses to use Slack. The number of companies where that is acceptable is probably limited. Unfortunately.
- abdulkareemsn 10y ago
  Recently I was doing some mean stack development ram was maxing out 8 GB and system was struggling to run smoothly Mongo alone was hogging around 1.5 GB and webpack was hogging 1 GB there are three seperate expressjs servers hogging 500 mb each And then there was slack
- apetresc 10y ago
  > I personally don't care if Electron goes away or what, but to the extent that I'm forced to run Slack by my cow-orkers' choices, it sure would be nice if it were less of a bucket of ass. For what it's worth, since you seem to like IRC clients so much better, Slack has a built-in IRC bridge: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-to-Slack-over-IRC-and-XMPP https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t.... It works just fine, in my experience.
  - mikejmoffitt 10y ago
    From experience, using the bridge means pinging the admin on slack about it, and convincing them that it's even worth doing, and then being stuck in "The IRC Room", instead of the others rooms in which people are actually communicating.
    - 10y ago
nojvek 10y ago
I totally agree with you. I only use Slack from we app but I'm a heavy user of VSCode and Spotify. I believe in standardized Web API's rather than a clusterfuck of native API's. The problem here is the base platform Electron and underlying Chrome/Nodejs But as consumers we feel when our browser lags, so browser vendors optimize speed over memory and cpu, caching the shit out of everything. The Web is a dangerous place so they further isolate every tab as process, sandbox them and keeps lots or copies of the same thing in RAM because a security flaw is a lot more shameful than a memory flaw. You are right, electron is a hog. Last I checked all, electron, chromium and Nodejs were open source. We can actually make a difference. Making noise also makes a difference. When someone complained about VSCode cpu usage because of idle cursor and it blew on HN, next month's release had a fix (for all platform) The truth is you can't move fast doing native development with different libraries. Electron keeps your dev costs down and allows you to move very fast.
- Gracana 10y ago
  > You are right, electron is a hog. Last I checked all, electron, chromium and Nodejs were open source. We can actually make a difference. Won't that encourage more companies to cut corners? How can producers of quality products compete when other companies can release prototypes that their paying customers finish for them?
  - nojvek 10y ago
    There's the argument "Why should I do it? If I'm paying for it then they should do it" And there's, "This really sucks, its an open source project, I think I can make a difference that would affect millions in a small way but would still make a big impact overall"
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Sanddancer 10y ago
  So use a cross-platform toolkit then like Qt, WxWidgets, Tk, etc. You don't need the bloat of a browser engine.
catshirt 10y ago
seriously. and skype is a grand example of how shitty a native client can be. tired of this argument. if you put in the proper effort, your users won't care or notice.
- matthewmacleod 10y ago
  You are of course correct. It's possible to make awful native applications, and good non-native applications. The sliders mean that you will trade performance off against ease-of-development. It will be easier to ship a basic Electron/web-stack app than a native one for multiple platforms. However, it will be harder to do this is in a high-performance and well-integrated way. I went through all this with Cordova back in the day when trying to build cross-platform mobile apps. I was able to ship apps quickly, but at the expense of quality – it's okay to do this so long as you are aware of the trade-off.
  - catshirt 10y ago
    yep definitely. and there is definitely a cost and effort required to make Electron feel as good as native. depending on your feature requirements, this can get really hairy. i'm just exhausted by the "web apps feel so much worse than native!1" argument which is an over simplification and not a rule.
- drdaeman 10y ago
  Is Skype native? Except for the very old 4.x Linux version - which is native Qt - and comparably old Windows ones, I thought, all of the recent versions are webbrowser wrappers (one sort or another) with some occasional native widgets around that.
  - drdaeman 10y ago
    (Can't edit the post above) But, of course, Skype issues aren't because of their UI nativeness. Their UI layer is... well, tolerable. Heck, I'd be happy if all I'd have to complain about Skype would be a crappy UI. But I don't think UI implementation has to do anything about why we love it so much. I mean, missing calls and messages every other week, random desync between clients and all the usual rituals that every other group call starts from (you can hear them accompanied with chants "can everyone hear me?", "$name are you here?", "tell me if you see my screen" and "let me drop the call and restart").
jernfrost 10y ago
The electron apps I've seen don't really have much UI. As soon as you build an app with some complexity it will start being a problem. As a native Mac developer I can drop in things like a predicate editor for defining filters or queries. They come with Cocoa. I can put in sophisticated table views and tree views. I can connect all of this easily to core data which loads from a database objects on demand without any code needed to be written by me. You see this sort of shortcuts in the electron apps I've seen. They don't have proper GUI for preference configuration like any Mac app as they can't get that for free. Atom doesn't have a regular file open dialog. I use that a lot, dropping a file into it to jump to a particular location I got open in Finder (file manager). My preferred editor, TextMate has very little development resources behind it compared to Atom, yet it has a far richer GUI. You got a GUI for creating and editing plugins. Not just editing config files. You got native rich UIs for selecting fonts and colors. You don't have to write font names and color names in some config file. There is a certain irony in the claim about how stuff like Electron saves you cross platform code, when what is usually not cross platform is the GUI, and the electron apps I've seen has very little of it. Try making something with the complexity of Keynote, Pages or Numbers in electron and I think the lack of a comprehensive set of prefabricated GUI components will start making its mark. Not to mention the numerous native APIs which exist which you have to duplicate, e.g. for vector graphics, animations, 3D graphics, audio, video, font handling, OpenCL. How about people with disabilities or internationalization? You got great native tools for doing that, how do you accomplish that in Electron without re-inventing the wheel?
- charlieflowers 10y ago
  > The electron apps I've seen don't really have much UI. As soon as you build an app with some complexity it will start being a problem. Well, VSCode certainly seems to contradict this.
  - eyko 10y ago
    The GUI in VS Code is basically: a file tree view, an editor area, the command palette overlay, a status bar, and the debugger panel/area.
speeder 10y ago
I use a macmini for my dev work. Almost every time it freezes out of the blue the culprit was some html based "app" frequently with process nwjs using 100% of cpu and huge amounts of ram. This includes chrome and electron based stuff
AlphaSite 10y ago
I actively don't use and discourage people from using Slack where I can because of how poorly it runs.
- mi100hael 10y ago
  And because it's a closed-source, expensive implementation of IRC.
  - AlphaSite 10y ago
    That's not great, but I can live with that.
  - eyko 10y ago
    With no fuss history
    - mi100hael 10y ago
      Honestly, though, the in-client search sucks. I'd much rather search archived text IRC logs through some web interface or locally than try and find something from 6 months ago within Slack.
- ziikutv 10y ago
  What about Slack webpage?
  - AlphaSite 10y ago
    Same issues. The bloat is atrocious.

by ballenf 10y ago

brandon272 10y ago

Slack behaves perfectly fine for me and I don't have incredible hardware. It's non-Electron apps that are typically mentioned by macOS' energy management system as "consuming significant energy", in my experience. Edit: Mass downvotes; lol ... Just stating my personal experience!

_jal 10y ago

> Is that true from a user's perspective? It is for this user. > What would Slack gain by integrating better with my Mac? Far better resource management, one would hope, for starters. As the article pointed out, when you're measuring your IRC client's memory use in hundreds of megs, there's a problem. It isn't uncommon for me to need to choose which "essential" apps to turn off to get something done on a maxed-out MBP. So Slack gets turned off, and maybe someone gets annoyed that I don't respond to something, while I run a few VMs in Slack's former memory space. As far as other things, well, using a platform's capabilities as appropriate is generally considered good form - HCI concerns, and, generally, just people like things to be consistent. I don't know why we're supposed to forget this now. I personally don't care if Electron goes away or what, but to the extent that I'm forced to run Slack by my cow-orkers' choices, it sure would be nice if it were less of a bucket of ass.

ballenf 10y ago
Finally an argument that is concrete and understandable! Seriously, this is the first comment I've read that is tangible as opposed to theoretical. All the other complaints are on the basis of being morally offended by the ratio of resource usage vs. application functionality. The nice thing about slack is that it will run about anywhere. The app on my phone magically knows if the app is not running on my laptop and will then and only then send me notifications. But, I'm not suggesting this as a solution for you -- best productivity killer I know is having to pay attention to yet another device while trying to get work done. Depends on your environment, but I have of one very effective and successful coworker who just flat out refuses to use Slack. The number of companies where that is acceptable is probably limited. Unfortunately.
abdulkareemsn 10y ago
Recently I was doing some mean stack development ram was maxing out 8 GB and system was struggling to run smoothly Mongo alone was hogging around 1.5 GB and webpack was hogging 1 GB there are three seperate expressjs servers hogging 500 mb each And then there was slack
apetresc 10y ago
> I personally don't care if Electron goes away or what, but to the extent that I'm forced to run Slack by my cow-orkers' choices, it sure would be nice if it were less of a bucket of ass. For what it's worth, since you seem to like IRC clients so much better, Slack has a built-in IRC bridge: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-to-Slack-over-IRC-and-XMPP https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t.... It works just fine, in my experience.
- mikejmoffitt 10y ago
  From experience, using the bridge means pinging the admin on slack about it, and convincing them that it's even worth doing, and then being stuck in "The IRC Room", instead of the others rooms in which people are actually communicating.
  - 10y ago

nojvek 10y ago

I totally agree with you. I only use Slack from we app but I'm a heavy user of VSCode and Spotify. I believe in standardized Web API's rather than a clusterfuck of native API's. The problem here is the base platform Electron and underlying Chrome/Nodejs But as consumers we feel when our browser lags, so browser vendors optimize speed over memory and cpu, caching the shit out of everything. The Web is a dangerous place so they further isolate every tab as process, sandbox them and keeps lots or copies of the same thing in RAM because a security flaw is a lot more shameful than a memory flaw. You are right, electron is a hog. Last I checked all, electron, chromium and Nodejs were open source. We can actually make a difference. Making noise also makes a difference. When someone complained about VSCode cpu usage because of idle cursor and it blew on HN, next month's release had a fix (for all platform) The truth is you can't move fast doing native development with different libraries. Electron keeps your dev costs down and allows you to move very fast.

Gracana 10y ago
> You are right, electron is a hog. Last I checked all, electron, chromium and Nodejs were open source. We can actually make a difference. Won't that encourage more companies to cut corners? How can producers of quality products compete when other companies can release prototypes that their paying customers finish for them?
- nojvek 10y ago
  There's the argument "Why should I do it? If I'm paying for it then they should do it" And there's, "This really sucks, its an open source project, I think I can make a difference that would affect millions in a small way but would still make a big impact overall"
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Sanddancer 10y ago
So use a cross-platform toolkit then like Qt, WxWidgets, Tk, etc. You don't need the bloat of a browser engine.

catshirt 10y ago

seriously. and skype is a grand example of how shitty a native client can be. tired of this argument. if you put in the proper effort, your users won't care or notice.

matthewmacleod 10y ago
You are of course correct. It's possible to make awful native applications, and good non-native applications. The sliders mean that you will trade performance off against ease-of-development. It will be easier to ship a basic Electron/web-stack app than a native one for multiple platforms. However, it will be harder to do this is in a high-performance and well-integrated way. I went through all this with Cordova back in the day when trying to build cross-platform mobile apps. I was able to ship apps quickly, but at the expense of quality – it's okay to do this so long as you are aware of the trade-off.
- catshirt 10y ago
  yep definitely. and there is definitely a cost and effort required to make Electron feel as good as native. depending on your feature requirements, this can get really hairy. i'm just exhausted by the "web apps feel so much worse than native!1" argument which is an over simplification and not a rule.
drdaeman 10y ago
Is Skype native? Except for the very old 4.x Linux version - which is native Qt - and comparably old Windows ones, I thought, all of the recent versions are webbrowser wrappers (one sort or another) with some occasional native widgets around that.
- drdaeman 10y ago
  (Can't edit the post above) But, of course, Skype issues aren't because of their UI nativeness. Their UI layer is... well, tolerable. Heck, I'd be happy if all I'd have to complain about Skype would be a crappy UI. But I don't think UI implementation has to do anything about why we love it so much. I mean, missing calls and messages every other week, random desync between clients and all the usual rituals that every other group call starts from (you can hear them accompanied with chants "can everyone hear me?", "$name are you here?", "tell me if you see my screen" and "let me drop the call and restart").

jernfrost 10y ago

The electron apps I've seen don't really have much UI. As soon as you build an app with some complexity it will start being a problem. As a native Mac developer I can drop in things like a predicate editor for defining filters or queries. They come with Cocoa. I can put in sophisticated table views and tree views. I can connect all of this easily to core data which loads from a database objects on demand without any code needed to be written by me. You see this sort of shortcuts in the electron apps I've seen. They don't have proper GUI for preference configuration like any Mac app as they can't get that for free. Atom doesn't have a regular file open dialog. I use that a lot, dropping a file into it to jump to a particular location I got open in Finder (file manager). My preferred editor, TextMate has very little development resources behind it compared to Atom, yet it has a far richer GUI. You got a GUI for creating and editing plugins. Not just editing config files. You got native rich UIs for selecting fonts and colors. You don't have to write font names and color names in some config file. There is a certain irony in the claim about how stuff like Electron saves you cross platform code, when what is usually not cross platform is the GUI, and the electron apps I've seen has very little of it. Try making something with the complexity of Keynote, Pages or Numbers in electron and I think the lack of a comprehensive set of prefabricated GUI components will start making its mark. Not to mention the numerous native APIs which exist which you have to duplicate, e.g. for vector graphics, animations, 3D graphics, audio, video, font handling, OpenCL. How about people with disabilities or internationalization? You got great native tools for doing that, how do you accomplish that in Electron without re-inventing the wheel?

charlieflowers 10y ago
> The electron apps I've seen don't really have much UI. As soon as you build an app with some complexity it will start being a problem. Well, VSCode certainly seems to contradict this.
- eyko 10y ago
  The GUI in VS Code is basically: a file tree view, an editor area, the command palette overlay, a status bar, and the debugger panel/area.

speeder 10y ago

I use a macmini for my dev work. Almost every time it freezes out of the blue the culprit was some html based "app" frequently with process nwjs using 100% of cpu and huge amounts of ram. This includes chrome and electron based stuff

AlphaSite 10y ago

I actively don't use and discourage people from using Slack where I can because of how poorly it runs.

mi100hael 10y ago
And because it's a closed-source, expensive implementation of IRC.
- AlphaSite 10y ago
  That's not great, but I can live with that.
- eyko 10y ago
  With no fuss history
  - mi100hael 10y ago
    Honestly, though, the in-client search sucks. I'd much rather search archived text IRC logs through some web interface or locally than try and find something from 6 months ago within Slack.
ziikutv 10y ago
What about Slack webpage?
- AlphaSite 10y ago
  Same issues. The bloat is atrocious.