7 ms·

> snappy enough to run > Electron is a new brainer Not everyone on earth is a dev/gamer/video-editor. For regular people, electron is a cancer that needs to be

by fxfan 8y ago

> snappy enough to run > Electron is a new brainer Not everyone on earth is a dev/gamer/video-editor. For regular people, electron is a cancer that needs to be nipped in the bud. Remember, 91% of the desktop on earth is Windows (meaning regular USD 300 machines). And of them I'd wager less than 10% fit have machines where electron is snappy (1.2K Thinkpads). What the earth needs is a better cross platform native GUI framework. NOT electron.

faitswulff 8y ago
> Not everyone on earth is a dev/gamer/video-editor. For regular people, electron is a cancer that needs to be nipped in the bud. That's not how I expected that sentence to end. I don't think regular people are nearly as concerned with performance as the groups you listed are. Regular people are probably using Electron via Slack for work and if it's slow and bloated it's ultimately not their problem. Even a few seconds delay won't cost them anything when it's still a faster replacement for email.
- fxfan 8y ago
  How many non-devs (equivalent to the group of RAM < 6GB) use slack?
  - eyko 8y ago
    I work with a few organisations and small teams that use slack to communicate. They're campaigners, marketing types, logistics, finance, HR, and overall general staff working for businesses and organisations. I was also attending some university lectures recently (on history) and the class had a slack account which we were invited to join if we had any questions or needed support. You also don't need to focus on Slack. Skype is an electron app. How many people use Skype to connect with their family?
  - fedesilva 8y ago
    About 6k+ people use it in my org - the vast majority are not devs.
- toyg 8y ago
  The irony of talking about "regular people" and then using Slack as somebody "regular people" actually use. "Regular people" are likely to encounter electron by using Telegram or Whatsapp on the desktop, or some recent MS product like Skype. Whether they care or not about bloat, I don't know. I know those chat programs used to have annoying problems with cut & paste and not supporting basic assistive technology (i.e. the "emoji keyboard"), but I have to admit they got better with time; if those fixes have made it upstream to Electron, then things are improving. They are still horribly opaque to native OS services like sharing facilities and whatnot, but it looks like OS developers themselves are throwing all that away these days, so... I expect the real issue Electron might never solve is real support for more advanced assistive tech for the visually-impaired and other disabled people. That stuff barely works with traditional desktop tech as it is. Obviously that has never been an obstacle in the market at large, it mostly plays a part in public-procurement processes.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    As usual, "regular people" means whatever the poster needs it to mean in order for their argument to make sense. It's a straw man.
  - FiddlyPack 8y ago
    Electron has a leg up in this regard long term, insomuch as the web is a platform that folks using assistive tech often use, Chromium is a reasonable target for assistive web technologies, and Electron apps have a higher chance of using accessible semantic building blocks by default. Now, in practice? Yeah, not so good right now.
  - chupasaurus 8y ago
    Telegram Desktop is a Qt-based app and it doesn't run everything on top of QtWebEngine.
  - sorenjan 8y ago
    > "Regular people" are likely to encounter electron by using Telegram or Whatsapp on the desktop Telegram is written in C++ and uses Qt. Maybe you're thinking of Discord? https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop
beaconstudios 8y ago
and until that exists?
dspillett 8y ago
But also remember that those $300 machines are mostly used for next to nothing. For the vast majority of the time people with those machines will have a couple of social media apps open in browsers, a media player running, maybe a mail reader, and perhaps some simple casual game. They aren't going to be running the several apps of any sort, never mind Electron ones, so what does it matter that several Electron apps would make the machine grind into a swappy mess? If the regular people expect anything modern to be snappy on those machines then they have been mis-sold to[1] and that isn't our fault as devs. > What the earth needs is... Then why don't you put a team together and make it, and gain the fame and fortune that comes from solving the matter? > NOT electron Nobody is forcing you to use Electron based apps. If you find them, or anything else, too slow then find an alternative that is in a native toolset or entirely browser based, or what-ever. A key problem is that people want what the want, they want it now, they want it to work on their platform without needing specific version of anything else (i.e. a browser), and they want it free. If Electron allows the thing to be delivered now, in a cross-platform manner, and people aren't willing to wait or pay for the dev time to develop in something smaller/nippier, then Electron is what devs are going to use. I remember similar arguments regarding VB way back when: people wanting something that started faster and used less RAM bitterly complaining, but not wanting to use alternatives that were available because they cost more. To my mind Electron has a very similar feel to VB back then: great for prototyping, but can be used to produce fuller solutions too if you are willing to accept the cost in speed and weight. [1] Oh how I love having to explain that 32GB total storage isn't really enough for Win10, especially when that is slow eMMC and the machine is swapping to it on account of only having 2GB RAM, when the sales person[2] said otherwise. [2] People don't seem to accept "well go ask the salesman to make Office fit and make it go fast for you, you obviously think he knows more than I do"[3] as a valid response... [3] Heck, those diminutive laptops/tablets/black-boxes-to-plug-into-your-tv, that are still being actively sold as Win10 compatible, can't even install the latest Win10 updates without some technical jiggery-pokery.
w0utert 8y ago
>> What the earth needs is a better cross platform native GUI framework. NOT electron. I always like to use VSCode as an example. It's a tool a use on a daily basis, and I like almost everything about it. It's also a poster-child for a good Electron application, maybe one of the best around. Add to that I completely understand why it was made using Electron, and why it might not have existed in this form (available, up-to-date, and feature-complete on all platforms, regularly improved, etc) at all if it wasn't because of Electron. But it's not.snappy.enough. Even though large performance-sensitive parts of it like the editor buffer data structures etc are (AFAIK) implemented natively, the whole user experience is actually quite bad. It's sluggish, inconsistent, it's full of random glitches, and everything feels like an insane amount of effort went into putting more and more lipstick on various parts of a pig to hide that the whole thing is like a house of cards and sluggishness and instability hides around every corner. I feel a little sad that so many developers defend Electron so vehemently, pretending that it's 'ok', 'fine' or even 'very good' for end users, because it's not. I fully agree it's great for the people (and mostly the companies making money off the people) who develop commercial stuff with it, because it obviously saves a shit-ton of money if you want to deploy something across the 3 major platforms. All of this is completely unrelated to the end-user experience though, who typically uses just one platform at a time and couldn't care less if the application they are using is also on some other platform. Or if they use it across multiple platforms, how many extra UI devs where needed to make native UI's for each of them. Any developer who knows how freaking fast modern computers are and why should, when completely honest, should feel ashamed that something like Slack or VSCode is made in a way that makes it so sluggish and memory-hungry, and that we now all accept this because it's cheaper to develop that way, and the applications are (supposedly) 'snappy enough to run'
- GordonS 8y ago
  > I always like to use VSCode as an example... Agreed, it's a great example of why Electron exists, but also a great example of an Electron app done well - I've used other Electron apps that have far fewer features, yet feel sluggish and/or are incredible memory hogs. > But it's not.snappy.enough. I also use VSCode on a daily basis (on Windows), and TBH I don't find it any less snappy than native IDEs such as Visual Studio or Rider, or indeed native text editors such as Notepad2. > the whole user experience is actually quite bad. It's sluggish, inconsistent, it's full of random glitches Similarly, I just don't have this experience - I find it both consistent and performant. Do you use it on Windows, or another platform?
baldfat 8y ago
> Not everyone on earth is a dev/gamer/video-editor. For regular people, electron is a cancer that needs to be nipped in the bud. My 10 year old netbook runs RStudio? Discord works great on my 10 year old Dell 2nd screen computer. What doesn't run VSCode?
- finnthehuman 8y ago
  >What doesn't run VSCode? Last week was the first time my 2015 XPS laptop started swapping too hard to get any meaningful work done, and that was because I jumped onto a project with a vscode workflow. Technically it can run vscode fine. But only if it's exclusively vscode. So now I'm working in my editor of choice most of the time, and then closing all my open applications whenever I need to use the vscode extensions.
  - baldfat 8y ago
    Something is seriously wrong with your machine if ti is having issues running VSCode.
bitwize 8y ago
Qt isn't good enough for you? These days it's even scriptable with JavaScript.
- jasode 8y ago
  To add some fyi... a lot of Qt experts recommend you restrict the usage of Javscript to the QML layout of GUI controls and data binding. For business logic (especially cpu-intensive tasks), use C++. Example of that "avoid Javascript" advice: deep link: https://youtu.be/vzs5VPTf4QQ?t=30m55s https://youtu.be/vzs5VPTf4QQ?t=30m55s
  - bitwize 8y ago
    Even then, you have great bindings like PySide (for Python) that allow you to build Qt apps without resorting to C++. And it will still be snappier, and easier on disk and RAM, than Electron.
ericol 8y ago
Also, in the third world things are moving towards machines running celeron / atom CPUs, with 4GB of memory and 32 GB of hard drive space. Out of experience can tell you 32 GB is a space that can be killed rather fast.
jw14 8y ago
Over the years we've had many cross platform GUI frameworks. Both native (wxWindows, SWT) and non-native (Swing, Qt). Everyone was trying for "better". There have always been questions of adoption, stability, fidelity of the user experience and others. Meanwhile web apps have kept chugging along and browsers have gotten better and better. > What the earth needs is a better cross platform native GUI framework. I contend that "native" is irrelevant. People are "native" web users. They use web based interfaces daily. A browser based UI is the "cross platform native" (whatever that means) GUI. It can be fast (if you do the work, which may involve firing up external processes) it can be beautiful it can look native and it can deliver great user experiences. It's not the GUI framework we wanted, but it's the one we deserve :)
Ari_Ugwu 8y ago
For what it's worth I used VSCode as a ARM build on a Chromebook with crouton. It was fine. I think it cost me $150 used. > cancer that needs to be nipped in the bud. Come on with the hyperbole. Electron is effectively (nipped) as it is most usually just the shortest path to giving apps a persistent offline option outside of the browser sandbox. I don't know of _any_ electron app that isn't also a dedicated web app. VSCode is embedded as an editor in a few online code sandboxes. Electron apps will almost certainly be replaced with PWA akin to the MS strategy. Shared run time, distributed via a 'store' of some kind, etc. It's an arc that we are in the middle of. I get it, the world needs a better solution. However there isn't one. There isn't even a #2 best option. Electron's success is just the industry's continued failure. You'd think Google would be close with Flutter, but Flutter doesn't run in the browser. So, fail. Are there any options you'd suggest using _over_ Electron? Every couple months an electron thread pops up and gets the same bashing. The world very much needs electron and that's why it exists. jQuery was the same way forever. People just complained _constantly_ that we should be advancing the spec and using built in calls. That jQuery was some sort of bloated misstep. Well, we're still waiting for web components to be standardized more than 15 years later. So as I understand it, people that don't like electron would rather us use _nothing_. Thus providing _no_ stepping stone to what should rightfully come next. I see the same thing with electric cars. They aren't perfect _now_ so why invest in them at all? Why even explore an avenue that could lead to other innovations if it isn't _perfect_ out of the gate? 91% of the world population don't even own cars!
- fxfan 8y ago
  Why would you upvote me if you didn't agree with me? QT is what i would suggest over electron
  - Ari_Ugwu 8y ago
    Did I up vote you? Likely because your post was provocative and got me to engage.

by fxfan 8y ago

faitswulff 8y ago

> Not everyone on earth is a dev/gamer/video-editor. For regular people, electron is a cancer that needs to be nipped in the bud. That's not how I expected that sentence to end. I don't think regular people are nearly as concerned with performance as the groups you listed are. Regular people are probably using Electron via Slack for work and if it's slow and bloated it's ultimately not their problem. Even a few seconds delay won't cost them anything when it's still a faster replacement for email.

fxfan 8y ago
How many non-devs (equivalent to the group of RAM < 6GB) use slack?
- eyko 8y ago
  I work with a few organisations and small teams that use slack to communicate. They're campaigners, marketing types, logistics, finance, HR, and overall general staff working for businesses and organisations. I was also attending some university lectures recently (on history) and the class had a slack account which we were invited to join if we had any questions or needed support. You also don't need to focus on Slack. Skype is an electron app. How many people use Skype to connect with their family?
- fedesilva 8y ago
  About 6k+ people use it in my org - the vast majority are not devs.
toyg 8y ago
The irony of talking about "regular people" and then using Slack as somebody "regular people" actually use. "Regular people" are likely to encounter electron by using Telegram or Whatsapp on the desktop, or some recent MS product like Skype. Whether they care or not about bloat, I don't know. I know those chat programs used to have annoying problems with cut & paste and not supporting basic assistive technology (i.e. the "emoji keyboard"), but I have to admit they got better with time; if those fixes have made it upstream to Electron, then things are improving. They are still horribly opaque to native OS services like sharing facilities and whatnot, but it looks like OS developers themselves are throwing all that away these days, so... I expect the real issue Electron might never solve is real support for more advanced assistive tech for the visually-impaired and other disabled people. That stuff barely works with traditional desktop tech as it is. Obviously that has never been an obstacle in the market at large, it mostly plays a part in public-procurement processes.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  As usual, "regular people" means whatever the poster needs it to mean in order for their argument to make sense. It's a straw man.
- FiddlyPack 8y ago
  Electron has a leg up in this regard long term, insomuch as the web is a platform that folks using assistive tech often use, Chromium is a reasonable target for assistive web technologies, and Electron apps have a higher chance of using accessible semantic building blocks by default. Now, in practice? Yeah, not so good right now.
- chupasaurus 8y ago
  Telegram Desktop is a Qt-based app and it doesn't run everything on top of QtWebEngine.
- sorenjan 8y ago
  > "Regular people" are likely to encounter electron by using Telegram or Whatsapp on the desktop Telegram is written in C++ and uses Qt. Maybe you're thinking of Discord? https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop

beaconstudios 8y ago

and until that exists?

dspillett 8y ago

But also remember that those $300 machines are mostly used for next to nothing. For the vast majority of the time people with those machines will have a couple of social media apps open in browsers, a media player running, maybe a mail reader, and perhaps some simple casual game. They aren't going to be running the several apps of any sort, never mind Electron ones, so what does it matter that several Electron apps would make the machine grind into a swappy mess? If the regular people expect anything modern to be snappy on those machines then they have been mis-sold to[1] and that isn't our fault as devs. > What the earth needs is... Then why don't you put a team together and make it, and gain the fame and fortune that comes from solving the matter? > NOT electron Nobody is forcing you to use Electron based apps. If you find them, or anything else, too slow then find an alternative that is in a native toolset or entirely browser based, or what-ever. A key problem is that people want what the want, they want it now, they want it to work on their platform without needing specific version of anything else (i.e. a browser), and they want it free. If Electron allows the thing to be delivered now, in a cross-platform manner, and people aren't willing to wait or pay for the dev time to develop in something smaller/nippier, then Electron is what devs are going to use. I remember similar arguments regarding VB way back when: people wanting something that started faster and used less RAM bitterly complaining, but not wanting to use alternatives that were available because they cost more. To my mind Electron has a very similar feel to VB back then: great for prototyping, but can be used to produce fuller solutions too if you are willing to accept the cost in speed and weight. [1] Oh how I love having to explain that 32GB total storage isn't really enough for Win10, especially when that is slow eMMC and the machine is swapping to it on account of only having 2GB RAM, when the sales person[2] said otherwise. [2] People don't seem to accept "well go ask the salesman to make Office fit and make it go fast for you, you obviously think he knows more than I do"[3] as a valid response... [3] Heck, those diminutive laptops/tablets/black-boxes-to-plug-into-your-tv, that are still being actively sold as Win10 compatible, can't even install the latest Win10 updates without some technical jiggery-pokery.

w0utert 8y ago

>> What the earth needs is a better cross platform native GUI framework. NOT electron. I always like to use VSCode as an example. It's a tool a use on a daily basis, and I like almost everything about it. It's also a poster-child for a good Electron application, maybe one of the best around. Add to that I completely understand why it was made using Electron, and why it might not have existed in this form (available, up-to-date, and feature-complete on all platforms, regularly improved, etc) at all if it wasn't because of Electron. But it's not.snappy.enough. Even though large performance-sensitive parts of it like the editor buffer data structures etc are (AFAIK) implemented natively, the whole user experience is actually quite bad. It's sluggish, inconsistent, it's full of random glitches, and everything feels like an insane amount of effort went into putting more and more lipstick on various parts of a pig to hide that the whole thing is like a house of cards and sluggishness and instability hides around every corner. I feel a little sad that so many developers defend Electron so vehemently, pretending that it's 'ok', 'fine' or even 'very good' for end users, because it's not. I fully agree it's great for the people (and mostly the companies making money off the people) who develop commercial stuff with it, because it obviously saves a shit-ton of money if you want to deploy something across the 3 major platforms. All of this is completely unrelated to the end-user experience though, who typically uses just one platform at a time and couldn't care less if the application they are using is also on some other platform. Or if they use it across multiple platforms, how many extra UI devs where needed to make native UI's for each of them. Any developer who knows how freaking fast modern computers are and why should, when completely honest, should feel ashamed that something like Slack or VSCode is made in a way that makes it so sluggish and memory-hungry, and that we now all accept this because it's cheaper to develop that way, and the applications are (supposedly) 'snappy enough to run'

GordonS 8y ago
> I always like to use VSCode as an example... Agreed, it's a great example of why Electron exists, but also a great example of an Electron app done well - I've used other Electron apps that have far fewer features, yet feel sluggish and/or are incredible memory hogs. > But it's not.snappy.enough. I also use VSCode on a daily basis (on Windows), and TBH I don't find it any less snappy than native IDEs such as Visual Studio or Rider, or indeed native text editors such as Notepad2. > the whole user experience is actually quite bad. It's sluggish, inconsistent, it's full of random glitches Similarly, I just don't have this experience - I find it both consistent and performant. Do you use it on Windows, or another platform?

baldfat 8y ago

> Not everyone on earth is a dev/gamer/video-editor. For regular people, electron is a cancer that needs to be nipped in the bud. My 10 year old netbook runs RStudio? Discord works great on my 10 year old Dell 2nd screen computer. What doesn't run VSCode?

finnthehuman 8y ago
>What doesn't run VSCode? Last week was the first time my 2015 XPS laptop started swapping too hard to get any meaningful work done, and that was because I jumped onto a project with a vscode workflow. Technically it can run vscode fine. But only if it's exclusively vscode. So now I'm working in my editor of choice most of the time, and then closing all my open applications whenever I need to use the vscode extensions.
- baldfat 8y ago
  Something is seriously wrong with your machine if ti is having issues running VSCode.

bitwize 8y ago

Qt isn't good enough for you? These days it's even scriptable with JavaScript.

jasode 8y ago
To add some fyi... a lot of Qt experts recommend you restrict the usage of Javscript to the QML layout of GUI controls and data binding. For business logic (especially cpu-intensive tasks), use C++. Example of that "avoid Javascript" advice: deep link: https://youtu.be/vzs5VPTf4QQ?t=30m55s https://youtu.be/vzs5VPTf4QQ?t=30m55s
- bitwize 8y ago
  Even then, you have great bindings like PySide (for Python) that allow you to build Qt apps without resorting to C++. And it will still be snappier, and easier on disk and RAM, than Electron.

ericol 8y ago

Also, in the third world things are moving towards machines running celeron / atom CPUs, with 4GB of memory and 32 GB of hard drive space. Out of experience can tell you 32 GB is a space that can be killed rather fast.

jw14 8y ago

Over the years we've had many cross platform GUI frameworks. Both native (wxWindows, SWT) and non-native (Swing, Qt). Everyone was trying for "better". There have always been questions of adoption, stability, fidelity of the user experience and others. Meanwhile web apps have kept chugging along and browsers have gotten better and better. > What the earth needs is a better cross platform native GUI framework. I contend that "native" is irrelevant. People are "native" web users. They use web based interfaces daily. A browser based UI is the "cross platform native" (whatever that means) GUI. It can be fast (if you do the work, which may involve firing up external processes) it can be beautiful it can look native and it can deliver great user experiences. It's not the GUI framework we wanted, but it's the one we deserve :)

Ari_Ugwu 8y ago

For what it's worth I used VSCode as a ARM build on a Chromebook with crouton. It was fine. I think it cost me $150 used. > cancer that needs to be nipped in the bud. Come on with the hyperbole. Electron is effectively (nipped) as it is most usually just the shortest path to giving apps a persistent offline option outside of the browser sandbox. I don't know of _any_ electron app that isn't also a dedicated web app. VSCode is embedded as an editor in a few online code sandboxes. Electron apps will almost certainly be replaced with PWA akin to the MS strategy. Shared run time, distributed via a 'store' of some kind, etc. It's an arc that we are in the middle of. I get it, the world needs a better solution. However there isn't one. There isn't even a #2 best option. Electron's success is just the industry's continued failure. You'd think Google would be close with Flutter, but Flutter doesn't run in the browser. So, fail. Are there any options you'd suggest using _over_ Electron? Every couple months an electron thread pops up and gets the same bashing. The world very much needs electron and that's why it exists. jQuery was the same way forever. People just complained _constantly_ that we should be advancing the spec and using built in calls. That jQuery was some sort of bloated misstep. Well, we're still waiting for web components to be standardized more than 15 years later. So as I understand it, people that don't like electron would rather us use _nothing_. Thus providing _no_ stepping stone to what should rightfully come next. I see the same thing with electric cars. They aren't perfect _now_ so why invest in them at all? Why even explore an avenue that could lead to other innovations if it isn't _perfect_ out of the gate? 91% of the world population don't even own cars!

fxfan 8y ago
Why would you upvote me if you didn't agree with me? QT is what i would suggest over electron
- Ari_Ugwu 8y ago
  Did I up vote you? Likely because your post was provocative and got me to engage.