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In my experience, purely from a UX perspective (both visuals and responsiveness), a hand-crafted macOS app tends to be moderately better than an Electron app, b

by _bxg1 7y ago

In my experience, purely from a UX perspective (both visuals and responsiveness), a hand-crafted macOS app tends to be moderately better than an Electron app, but an Electron app is usually vastly better than a shoddy or cross-compiled native app.

saagarjha 7y ago
In user interface, sure. Performance-wise Electron usually loses even to things like GTK.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Every GTK app I've ever used that didn't come with the OS (granted, I've never actually paid for one) is, compared to most electron apps, a) ugly/buggy, and b) feature-anemic, because it's so much less easy to add features to it. And as a user, I've never noticed a performance difference. I know Electron uses more memory and such, but it just doesn't impact actual usage in my experience. Whereas things not getting implemented because of developer friction absolutely does.
leadingthenet 7y ago
A well-crafted, organic, gluten-free macOS app is generally the best UI and UX experience on any platform, by a mile. Apps that come to mind are Things by Cultured Code and (the as of yet unreleased to the public) Nova editor by Panic. No Electron app has ever even come close for me, certainly not VSCode that everyone seems to love so much. Then there's performance...
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Agree with the first part. But I would say the Slack UX, from a visual and performance perspective (not necessarily intuitiveness), is as good as nearly any native Mac app I've ever used. VSCode, from a visual and performance perspective, is better than any native Windows app I've ever used, and also as good as many native Mac apps. I know people like to gripe about the memory usage and disk space usage of Electron apps, which, fine. But it's a fairly academic complaint. Those things don't honestly affect my experience as a user. The only time an Electron app has ever felt sluggish to me was Atom, fully loaded with plugins (~3 years ago), and I honestly suspect that had more to do with its naive and non-cooperative plugin architecture than with Electron itself.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    > I know people like to gripe about the memory usage and disk space usage of Electron apps, which, fine. But it's a fairly academic complaint. Whether it's academic depends entirely on how much memory you have, and what else is using that memory. As with most resource-intensive software, you can brute force it with raw specs, but you're left with less computing power than you paid for. I was watching The Verge's review of the new Macbook Air last night, and they were talking about battery life. I'm paraphrasing, but they said something like: "Apple claims 13 hours of battery life, and you can get that if you live in Safari and other Apple apps. But I'm living my life in Chrome and Slack, and with those apps open I get closer to five hours." Chrome and Slack are, of course, the same thing. As strongly as I dislike locked down platforms, situations like this do make me somewhat understand why Apple doesn't allow web rendering engines other than Safari on iOS.
    - _bxg1 7y ago
      The weight of Chrome as a browser and the more general concept of using the web as a desktop app platform are two different things. I think that when most people complain about "electron apps", what they're complaining about is the latter. If you're complaining about the former, I think that's more fair. Although, I do question whether a third-party browser even has access to the APIs that make Safari's efficiency what it is. What I'd like to see, personally, is for the three major desktop OSes to agree on a "desktop WebView" standard. Then they can use whatever browser internals they want when it comes to launching those web apps. They could even let you pick your own, the same way you can pick your default browser now. This would not only allow people to use desktop safari for their "electron apps" if they want to, it would avoid one of today's major problems which is shipping a whole copy of the browser with each app. Web-based desktop apps would be no larger than native ones, and depending on how the OS handles them they could be roughly as performant.
      - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
        > The weight of Chrome as a browser and the more general concept of using the web as a desktop app platform are two different things. I understand where you're coming from, but when someone says says "Electron apps are slow resource hogs", they're fundamentally referring to the underlying engine that makes those apps slow. If that engine was fast and light on resources, the complaint wouldn't exist. Apple _does_ allow developers to use Safari Webviews within desktop apps, but by using Chromium everywhere, developers don't have to deal with cross-browser issues. Case in point: Slack video calls don't work in any web browser other than Chromium, because they don't implement WebRTC properly.

by _bxg1 7y ago

saagarjha 7y ago

In user interface, sure. Performance-wise Electron usually loses even to things like GTK.

_bxg1 7y ago
Every GTK app I've ever used that didn't come with the OS (granted, I've never actually paid for one) is, compared to most electron apps, a) ugly/buggy, and b) feature-anemic, because it's so much less easy to add features to it. And as a user, I've never noticed a performance difference. I know Electron uses more memory and such, but it just doesn't impact actual usage in my experience. Whereas things not getting implemented because of developer friction absolutely does.

leadingthenet 7y ago

A well-crafted, organic, gluten-free macOS app is generally the best UI and UX experience on any platform, by a mile. Apps that come to mind are Things by Cultured Code and (the as of yet unreleased to the public) Nova editor by Panic. No Electron app has ever even come close for me, certainly not VSCode that everyone seems to love so much. Then there's performance...

_bxg1 7y ago
Agree with the first part. But I would say the Slack UX, from a visual and performance perspective (not necessarily intuitiveness), is as good as nearly any native Mac app I've ever used. VSCode, from a visual and performance perspective, is better than any native Windows app I've ever used, and also as good as many native Mac apps. I know people like to gripe about the memory usage and disk space usage of Electron apps, which, fine. But it's a fairly academic complaint. Those things don't honestly affect my experience as a user. The only time an Electron app has ever felt sluggish to me was Atom, fully loaded with plugins (~3 years ago), and I honestly suspect that had more to do with its naive and non-cooperative plugin architecture than with Electron itself.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  > I know people like to gripe about the memory usage and disk space usage of Electron apps, which, fine. But it's a fairly academic complaint. Whether it's academic depends entirely on how much memory you have, and what else is using that memory. As with most resource-intensive software, you can brute force it with raw specs, but you're left with less computing power than you paid for. I was watching The Verge's review of the new Macbook Air last night, and they were talking about battery life. I'm paraphrasing, but they said something like: "Apple claims 13 hours of battery life, and you can get that if you live in Safari and other Apple apps. But I'm living my life in Chrome and Slack, and with those apps open I get closer to five hours." Chrome and Slack are, of course, the same thing. As strongly as I dislike locked down platforms, situations like this do make me somewhat understand why Apple doesn't allow web rendering engines other than Safari on iOS.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    The weight of Chrome as a browser and the more general concept of using the web as a desktop app platform are two different things. I think that when most people complain about "electron apps", what they're complaining about is the latter. If you're complaining about the former, I think that's more fair. Although, I do question whether a third-party browser even has access to the APIs that make Safari's efficiency what it is. What I'd like to see, personally, is for the three major desktop OSes to agree on a "desktop WebView" standard. Then they can use whatever browser internals they want when it comes to launching those web apps. They could even let you pick your own, the same way you can pick your default browser now. This would not only allow people to use desktop safari for their "electron apps" if they want to, it would avoid one of today's major problems which is shipping a whole copy of the browser with each app. Web-based desktop apps would be no larger than native ones, and depending on how the OS handles them they could be roughly as performant.
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      > The weight of Chrome as a browser and the more general concept of using the web as a desktop app platform are two different things. I understand where you're coming from, but when someone says says "Electron apps are slow resource hogs", they're fundamentally referring to the underlying engine that makes those apps slow. If that engine was fast and light on resources, the complaint wouldn't exist. Apple _does_ allow developers to use Safari Webviews within desktop apps, but by using Chromium everywhere, developers don't have to deal with cross-browser issues. Case in point: Slack video calls don't work in any web browser other than Chromium, because they don't implement WebRTC properly.