3 ms·

I'm going to take the contrarian position here and say No, there is no place for native desktop apps. If a user has enough resources to run a graphical operatin

by zelly 6y ago

I'm going to take the contrarian position here and say No, there is no place for native desktop apps. If a user has enough resources to run a graphical operating system, then they have enough resources for an extra copy of Chromium. The exception to this is something either so simple that it only has one button (e.g. some file format converter) or so large (e.g. Photoshop, Bloomberg, AutoCAD, Mathematica, Visual Studio) that it surpasses the capabilities of the web platform. Most things like chat, music, or word processing absolutely can and should be done with Electron or (imo) a WebView. The reason Slack etc. is slow is not because of Electron but because the JavaScript is probably very poor, bloated, and not optimized. I used to hate Electron for being slow but after using it have changed my mind. The bottleneck is never on the Electron side; it slow because of your code. VS Code is an Electron app and is snappier than many "native" editors.

adrianN 6y ago
Maybe your native editors just suck. There are many people who have older hardware. For example I write this on a 2009 Macbook. My parents use older hardware still. And we're relatively well-off in a rich western country. These machines are perfectly fine to use for almost all tasks, but they're not powerful enough to run ten copies of Chrome. We might easily be able to afford that newer 500€ laptop, but for many people that multiple months of income. Not to mention the unnecessary waste the churn produces.
- zelly 6y ago
  What about WebView then? Surely you can run 10 desktop apps that use WebView because it's just like having 10 Chrome tabs open.
- liendolucas 6y ago
  And also sometimes there is absolutely no need to buy new hardware! I find appalling that we need to upgrade our machines just because software gets more and more resource hungry. My parents as well use old hardware to browse, edit documents and write emails. Back at I home I still run a 10 year old PC with Linux and it just keeps running very well... No need to upgrade! I just think about the golden age of videogames and the software tricks developers came up with to make them run and the hardware those used to run on. Today basically you need to constantly upgrade your GPU if you want to play the latest cool game. Ridiculous.

by zelly 6y ago

adrianN 6y ago

Maybe your native editors just suck. There are many people who have older hardware. For example I write this on a 2009 Macbook. My parents use older hardware still. And we're relatively well-off in a rich western country. These machines are perfectly fine to use for almost all tasks, but they're not powerful enough to run ten copies of Chrome. We might easily be able to afford that newer 500€ laptop, but for many people that multiple months of income. Not to mention the unnecessary waste the churn produces.

zelly 6y ago
What about WebView then? Surely you can run 10 desktop apps that use WebView because it's just like having 10 Chrome tabs open.
liendolucas 6y ago
And also sometimes there is absolutely no need to buy new hardware! I find appalling that we need to upgrade our machines just because software gets more and more resource hungry. My parents as well use old hardware to browse, edit documents and write emails. Back at I home I still run a 10 year old PC with Linux and it just keeps running very well... No need to upgrade! I just think about the golden age of videogames and the software tricks developers came up with to make them run and the hardware those used to run on. Today basically you need to constantly upgrade your GPU if you want to play the latest cool game. Ridiculous.