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When Microsoft switched to Flat UI it lost all ability to control the native UI platform of Windows. Thanks to Flat UI, native apps are indistinguishable from W

When Microsoft switched to Flat UI it lost all ability to control the native UI platform of Windows. Thanks to Flat UI, native apps are indistinguishable from Web apps. If ordinary users can't tell a native app from a Web app why invest in native app, which only a subset of potential users can use? If you use Electron then you can use web technologies, and everyone can use your app including Windows users, Mac users, Linux users, mobile users and web users. Yes, Electron requires more resources than native apps, but that's only a problem if you're making a trivial app such as a calculator. If you're building a substantial app then the fact that Electron apps require more memory is usually not a problem. And that's the reason Microsoft themselves uses Electron for Teams, VSCode etc.

Varriount 7y ago
Until you have 5 electron apps open taking 12 GB of RAM and half the power your 6 core CPU. The benefit of using an OS native library is that (ideally) memory can be shared between processes via various behind-the-scenes mechanisms (shared DLL memory, graphics caches, etc).
jyrkesh 7y ago
> If you're building a substantial app then the fact that Electron apps require more memory is usually not a problem. Gonna need a citation on that. Every tab of Gmail I have open takes up more RAM than my fully-featured Outlook desktop app that's pushing an order of magnitude more items through Exchange. Slack, Discord, and Teams are loads more heavyweight than all the fanciest (non-Electron) IRC clients. Or look at Telegram: wicked fast native client that's barely using more than 100 MBs on my box with 20 some odd group chats all pushing instant multimedia notifications every couple mins. Not to mention all the Electron counterparts are just slower. I actually don't know what black magic Microsoft did to make VS Code so snappy (it's way more responsive than all those chat apps I listed above), but it's also still noticeably laggier than Sublime and true Vim.
- doesnt_know 7y ago
  There are all these clients out there now that use far more memory then native alternatives and objectively perform far worse but they are all insanely popular and dwarf the alternatives in terms of user base. So I mean, "it's usually not a problem" is true, resource consumption of the clients don't appear to affect acquisition of users or popularity of the platform.
  - zapzupnz 7y ago
    Not a problem for one metric, sure. Certainly a problem in others. Let's not imagine that because one thing is a success, all its other failures must be ignored.
  - jyrkesh 7y ago
    That ignores the fact that those apps may have done even better had they invested in native alternatives. I don't think it's a stretch to assume that there's some non-zero set of folks out there that tried to switch from Exchange/Outlook to Slack at scale and said "this doesn't really meet our needs". Some of that is UX, sure, but that UX was also driven by the limitations of performance. How big is that non-zero set? Who's to say, business is hard and full of imperfect assumptions. But I can tell you as a user of most of these apps, having them not do what I tell them to do because of laggy UIs is infuriating. (E.g. I constantly make the mistake of "reacting" to someone else's message in Teams while I'm trying to find a permalink or edit my own message. Then they get a push notification, I erase the reaction, and I hope they assume it was a mistake. Happens every couple days.)
tomc1985 7y ago
This is the sort of logic that keeps a desktop-development plague like Electron going strong > Yes, Electron requires more resources than native apps It requires orders of magnitude more resources. Many of us are sick of watching huge chunks of expensive computers' ample resources go to waste so that some startup dweeb can avoid hiring actual desktop development people. It is the #1 harbinger of the kind of resource inflation and lack of engineering excellence that keeps people having to buy new hardware unnecessarily, but hey who cares BeCaUsE mAh BaLaNcE sHeEtS
- lordlic 7y ago
  > Many of us are sick of ... Not many enough to matter. > who cares BeCaUsE mAh BaLaNcE sHeEtS It is an actual concrete fact that in many (most?) cases the total cost of developing and owning an Electron-powered app is going to be lower than a real native desktop application given that you can reuse the same code/people/skills you already employ on your website and mobile app. Building the same UI n times is crazy. Are you just complaining about that fact or actually suggesting that we ignore it and stand up against "resource inflation" as a matter of principle? I can't imagine a startup CEO going before their board with a slide deck and saying "We're making progress on a unified app experience across web and mobile that should reduce our development costs. We were going to do the same thing for desktop too, but then we realized that Engineering Excellence™ meant we had to hire a whole new team of developers. No, the app isn't performance constrained, why do you ask? Sure, everyone else is using Electron but everyone else is wrong."
  - fifticon 7y ago
    You sound like one of the reasons the Epic Background Launcher takes up 293 MB of ram when idling in the background.. I was recently trying to figure out why my nephew's 16gig machine was running so slowly. It turned out, it was because he had just installed loads of crap like that. I can now see, what he really needed, was 32gig of RAM and 128 cores instead, to run your electron apps.

Varriount 7y ago

Until you have 5 electron apps open taking 12 GB of RAM and half the power your 6 core CPU. The benefit of using an OS native library is that (ideally) memory can be shared between processes via various behind-the-scenes mechanisms (shared DLL memory, graphics caches, etc).

jyrkesh 7y ago

> If you're building a substantial app then the fact that Electron apps require more memory is usually not a problem. Gonna need a citation on that. Every tab of Gmail I have open takes up more RAM than my fully-featured Outlook desktop app that's pushing an order of magnitude more items through Exchange. Slack, Discord, and Teams are loads more heavyweight than all the fanciest (non-Electron) IRC clients. Or look at Telegram: wicked fast native client that's barely using more than 100 MBs on my box with 20 some odd group chats all pushing instant multimedia notifications every couple mins. Not to mention all the Electron counterparts are just slower. I actually don't know what black magic Microsoft did to make VS Code so snappy (it's way more responsive than all those chat apps I listed above), but it's also still noticeably laggier than Sublime and true Vim.

doesnt_know 7y ago
There are all these clients out there now that use far more memory then native alternatives and objectively perform far worse but they are all insanely popular and dwarf the alternatives in terms of user base. So I mean, "it's usually not a problem" is true, resource consumption of the clients don't appear to affect acquisition of users or popularity of the platform.
- zapzupnz 7y ago
  Not a problem for one metric, sure. Certainly a problem in others. Let's not imagine that because one thing is a success, all its other failures must be ignored.
- jyrkesh 7y ago
  That ignores the fact that those apps may have done even better had they invested in native alternatives. I don't think it's a stretch to assume that there's some non-zero set of folks out there that tried to switch from Exchange/Outlook to Slack at scale and said "this doesn't really meet our needs". Some of that is UX, sure, but that UX was also driven by the limitations of performance. How big is that non-zero set? Who's to say, business is hard and full of imperfect assumptions. But I can tell you as a user of most of these apps, having them not do what I tell them to do because of laggy UIs is infuriating. (E.g. I constantly make the mistake of "reacting" to someone else's message in Teams while I'm trying to find a permalink or edit my own message. Then they get a push notification, I erase the reaction, and I hope they assume it was a mistake. Happens every couple days.)

tomc1985 7y ago

This is the sort of logic that keeps a desktop-development plague like Electron going strong > Yes, Electron requires more resources than native apps It requires orders of magnitude more resources. Many of us are sick of watching huge chunks of expensive computers' ample resources go to waste so that some startup dweeb can avoid hiring actual desktop development people. It is the #1 harbinger of the kind of resource inflation and lack of engineering excellence that keeps people having to buy new hardware unnecessarily, but hey who cares BeCaUsE mAh BaLaNcE sHeEtS

lordlic 7y ago
> Many of us are sick of ... Not many enough to matter. > who cares BeCaUsE mAh BaLaNcE sHeEtS It is an actual concrete fact that in many (most?) cases the total cost of developing and owning an Electron-powered app is going to be lower than a real native desktop application given that you can reuse the same code/people/skills you already employ on your website and mobile app. Building the same UI n times is crazy. Are you just complaining about that fact or actually suggesting that we ignore it and stand up against "resource inflation" as a matter of principle? I can't imagine a startup CEO going before their board with a slide deck and saying "We're making progress on a unified app experience across web and mobile that should reduce our development costs. We were going to do the same thing for desktop too, but then we realized that Engineering Excellence™ meant we had to hire a whole new team of developers. No, the app isn't performance constrained, why do you ask? Sure, everyone else is using Electron but everyone else is wrong."
- fifticon 7y ago
  You sound like one of the reasons the Epic Background Launcher takes up 293 MB of ram when idling in the background.. I was recently trying to figure out why my nephew's 16gig machine was running so slowly. It turned out, it was because he had just installed loads of crap like that. I can now see, what he really needed, was 32gig of RAM and 128 cores instead, to run your electron apps.