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I cannot love Electron. It's almost always an inappropriate choice for a desktop application, yet I see more and more of what should be power-user desktop appl
by thrower123 7y ago
I cannot love Electron. It's almost always an inappropriate choice for a desktop application, yet I see more and more of what should be power-user desktop applications moving towards using it, and it is horrible.
My largest gripe with it, besides the others that are discussed ad nauseum already, is that it is impossible, seemingly, for Electron apps to spawn multiple windows without creating entire new instances. I have several Electron-based chat applications that are a trainwreck to use, compared to their predecessors, because there is no effective way to handle more than one chat at a time; they can't just pop out a small dedicated window for a chat conversation, they have to live inside their one window, and this results in a terrible tabbed UI where one is constantly flipping back and forth between conversation threads. Or the bevy of Electron text editors that you cannot tear a file tab off and put on another screen.
- lukevp 7y agoThis isn't really true. Electron itself has a renderer process and a background process. It's completely possible to make multiple renderers with independent windows that can coordinate with IPC through the background process. We have an electron app that does this and has undockable tabs, it's not even very hard to implement if you're using something like Redux for a window level state store, you just pass it thru IPC to the new session.
- hechang1997 7y agothe most important reason that leads to electron's adoption, I believe, is the flexibility and customizability of HTML UI compared to traditional widget-based ones.
- thrower123 7y agoThis is a weak argument, unless people have just never used desktop widget libraries and are arguing against an imagined strawman. There is not a farthings real difference between the two.