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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 peopl

by _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.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  > 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. Firstly: in that case you'd have to compare it to the weight of the entire desktop environment. I would bet money that Gnome + your GTK app is not meaningfully lighter-weight than Chrome + an Electron app. It's just that the former has a privileged place in the OS, and is a dynamically-linked dependency instead of a statically-linked one (using those terms loosely). Secondly: The web itself is not fundamentally slow. People who aren't web developers love to repeat this mantra, but it's simply not true. That's what I'm trying to get to the heart of here: 1) JavaScript is slower than C++, but it's very rare that enough actual work is being done in JavaScript for it to become a bottleneck (on the UI side), even in complex web-apps. Most of the grunt-work, including recalculating layout, is implemented in C++ as part of the browser. 2) Layout calculation can be slow-ish in extreme cases, but that's a direct tradeoff for the benefit of using the world's most advanced UI layout system, which provides real value. 3) Under normal circumstances an entire web page runs in a single thread, which can be a problem when the occasional expensive operation blocks other ones, but Electron gives you several options for moving expensive operations to separate threads. By default the web view runs in a separate thread from the "main" process, and you can spin up workers or even split your UI into separate web views so each panel gets its own thread. I think the origins of this myth are: 1) Websites have become much slower than they need to be with the increase in JavaScript dependencies. 90% of this is due to ads and analytics, which couldn't care less about their impact on page performance. The rest has mostly to do with the initial load-time of that 1-2MB script, rather than the runtime of the actual JS code. 2) As with any technology that lowers the barriers to making things, there's been a dilution of less-skilled developers putting things out into the world, decreasing the overall perceived quality of the space. But this isn't an indictment of the technology; if anything, it's a complement. It has to be distinguished from the actual merits of the tech. > but by using Chromium everywhere, developers don't have to deal with cross-browser issues I think it has more to do with being able to build and ship copies for all systems through a single channel. Building a "first-class" Mac app (a dock icon, hooks into system APIs, etc.) that uses Safari's web view right now would probably mean opening XCode and writing quite a bit of actual Swift as a wrapper around the web UI. People don't want to do that; it defeats a lot of the purpose. My proposal in my last comment would solve this problem.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    I don't think that the web is fundamentally slow! I do think Chromium in particular has become a major resource hog. Firefox, which doesn't have Safari's platform advantage, opens more quickly and takes up much less memory than Chrome (even as it still uses up battery quickly). Gnome Web, a Linux webkit-based browser for Linux, also performs quite admirably, so I'm not convinced Safari's success is simply due to its macOS integration. There've been a couple attempts to build electron-like frameworks that use the OS's native webview, but they don't seem to have gained that much traction. Deskgap is probably the most mature of them, relatively speaking. https://deskgap.com/ https://deskgap.com/ https://github.com/pojala/electrino https://github.com/pojala/electrino https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark

by _bxg1 7y ago

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.

_bxg1 7y ago
> 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. Firstly: in that case you'd have to compare it to the weight of the entire desktop environment. I would bet money that Gnome + your GTK app is not meaningfully lighter-weight than Chrome + an Electron app. It's just that the former has a privileged place in the OS, and is a dynamically-linked dependency instead of a statically-linked one (using those terms loosely). Secondly: The web itself is not fundamentally slow. People who aren't web developers love to repeat this mantra, but it's simply not true. That's what I'm trying to get to the heart of here: 1) JavaScript is slower than C++, but it's very rare that enough actual work is being done in JavaScript for it to become a bottleneck (on the UI side), even in complex web-apps. Most of the grunt-work, including recalculating layout, is implemented in C++ as part of the browser. 2) Layout calculation can be slow-ish in extreme cases, but that's a direct tradeoff for the benefit of using the world's most advanced UI layout system, which provides real value. 3) Under normal circumstances an entire web page runs in a single thread, which can be a problem when the occasional expensive operation blocks other ones, but Electron gives you several options for moving expensive operations to separate threads. By default the web view runs in a separate thread from the "main" process, and you can spin up workers or even split your UI into separate web views so each panel gets its own thread. I think the origins of this myth are: 1) Websites have become much slower than they need to be with the increase in JavaScript dependencies. 90% of this is due to ads and analytics, which couldn't care less about their impact on page performance. The rest has mostly to do with the initial load-time of that 1-2MB script, rather than the runtime of the actual JS code. 2) As with any technology that lowers the barriers to making things, there's been a dilution of less-skilled developers putting things out into the world, decreasing the overall perceived quality of the space. But this isn't an indictment of the technology; if anything, it's a complement. It has to be distinguished from the actual merits of the tech. > but by using Chromium everywhere, developers don't have to deal with cross-browser issues I think it has more to do with being able to build and ship copies for all systems through a single channel. Building a "first-class" Mac app (a dock icon, hooks into system APIs, etc.) that uses Safari's web view right now would probably mean opening XCode and writing quite a bit of actual Swift as a wrapper around the web UI. People don't want to do that; it defeats a lot of the purpose. My proposal in my last comment would solve this problem.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  I don't think that the web is fundamentally slow! I do think Chromium in particular has become a major resource hog. Firefox, which doesn't have Safari's platform advantage, opens more quickly and takes up much less memory than Chrome (even as it still uses up battery quickly). Gnome Web, a Linux webkit-based browser for Linux, also performs quite admirably, so I'm not convinced Safari's success is simply due to its macOS integration. There've been a couple attempts to build electron-like frameworks that use the OS's native webview, but they don't seem to have gained that much traction. Deskgap is probably the most mature of them, relatively speaking. https://deskgap.com/ https://deskgap.com/ https://github.com/pojala/electrino https://github.com/pojala/electrino https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark