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The point is that developers don't want to be testing against multiple browser/rendering engines--hence why Electron was built. Maybe having multiple engines i

The point is that developers don't want to be testing against multiple browser/rendering engines--hence why Electron was built. Maybe having multiple engines is good (although maybe the benefits are overstated since nowadays most engines align with the spec instead of implementing non-standard extensions like ActiveX), but it's not good for people for who want to quickly, and with low effort, develop desktop applications. The point of the parent comment was that developers chose Electron over other frameworks for reasons such as speed of development, and DeskGap does not align with those reasons.

kijin 8y ago
What developers want is important, but what users want is even more important. If a lightweight app is what users want, that's a good enough reason for at least some companies to consider DeskGap over Electron. I'm sick of sluggish "native" apps on my i7 PC with fast SSDs and 32GB of RAM. I don't even want to imagine how those apps perform on low-end devices.
- jhgg 8y ago
  The cost savings here is in download/package size, and not runtime performance. Chances are latest chromium is faster than the system web-browser.
  - kijin 8y ago
    Startup time matters. Chances are the system web browser is already cached in memory, whereas every Electron app wants to load its own Chromium runtime.
- icelancer 8y ago
  > but what users want is even more important Only developers and very tech-savvy people bitch about Slack. Your average person working in Sales, HR, or operations cares not for the memory footprint of Slack. It's also not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. Yeah, it's slower than mIRC, fair enough. But IRC is dead to almost everyone and Slack took over, so it is what it is.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    They do, but they misdiagnose it as "my computer is slow" or normalize it because that's all they're used to.
    - arvinsim 8y ago
      Anecdata but I never heard of that complaint for people I know that use Slack. Maybe the circle I am in simply has great computers. But who knows.
- dmitriid 8y ago
  Users don’t want a “lightweight app”. Users want an app with <a list of features>.
  - arvinsim 8y ago
    Exactly. If users are held at gunpoint and have to choose between a fast app and a feature rich app, I would bet they will choose the latter.
    - userbinator 8y ago
      Given what counts as "feature rich" these days (and it seems some developers are constantly removing things that users used to use), I doubt that. Software used to be both fast and "feature rich" (relatively speaking), designed so users could "grow" and learn increasingly more of it. Now almost everything seems to have idiotically dumbed-down "flat" UIs that look simpler yet still manage to consume more resources than before. The new Skype is a great example. Compare to something like this: https://www.microsip.org/ https://www.microsip.org/ Yes, I know they're different protocols, but the point is that IM and audio/video call functionality doesn't need to take as much resources as Skype does.
      - dmitriid 8y ago
        The new Skype is a bad example. It's a perfect example of a designed-by-a-committee-of-managers product that tries and fails to understand the moving part of alternatives such as Slack, Facebook Messenger etc.

kijin 8y ago

What developers want is important, but what users want is even more important. If a lightweight app is what users want, that's a good enough reason for at least some companies to consider DeskGap over Electron. I'm sick of sluggish "native" apps on my i7 PC with fast SSDs and 32GB of RAM. I don't even want to imagine how those apps perform on low-end devices.

jhgg 8y ago
The cost savings here is in download/package size, and not runtime performance. Chances are latest chromium is faster than the system web-browser.
- kijin 8y ago
  Startup time matters. Chances are the system web browser is already cached in memory, whereas every Electron app wants to load its own Chromium runtime.
icelancer 8y ago
> but what users want is even more important Only developers and very tech-savvy people bitch about Slack. Your average person working in Sales, HR, or operations cares not for the memory footprint of Slack. It's also not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. Yeah, it's slower than mIRC, fair enough. But IRC is dead to almost everyone and Slack took over, so it is what it is.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  They do, but they misdiagnose it as "my computer is slow" or normalize it because that's all they're used to.
  - arvinsim 8y ago
    Anecdata but I never heard of that complaint for people I know that use Slack. Maybe the circle I am in simply has great computers. But who knows.
dmitriid 8y ago
Users don’t want a “lightweight app”. Users want an app with <a list of features>.
- arvinsim 8y ago
  Exactly. If users are held at gunpoint and have to choose between a fast app and a feature rich app, I would bet they will choose the latter.
  - userbinator 8y ago
    Given what counts as "feature rich" these days (and it seems some developers are constantly removing things that users used to use), I doubt that. Software used to be both fast and "feature rich" (relatively speaking), designed so users could "grow" and learn increasingly more of it. Now almost everything seems to have idiotically dumbed-down "flat" UIs that look simpler yet still manage to consume more resources than before. The new Skype is a great example. Compare to something like this: https://www.microsip.org/ https://www.microsip.org/ Yes, I know they're different protocols, but the point is that IM and audio/video call functionality doesn't need to take as much resources as Skype does.
    - dmitriid 8y ago
      The new Skype is a bad example. It's a perfect example of a designed-by-a-committee-of-managers product that tries and fails to understand the moving part of alternatives such as Slack, Facebook Messenger etc.