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Electron came out of Atom, which came out of GitHub, which Microsoft now owns. Obviously Microsoft is a vast empire and there's no reason every team will adopt
by bastawhiz 5y ago
Electron came out of Atom, which came out of GitHub, which Microsoft now owns. Obviously Microsoft is a vast empire and there's no reason every team will adopt other teams' work, but it seems curious to hear that electron was dropped for what's effectively the same tech (chromium rendering a web app).
The article tries to explain why Edge Webview2 is better, but I don't find the explanation very compelling. Chromium doesn't seem to be the problem, because both technologies use chromium. So is it the Node bits? Configuration of chromium inside of electron?
From the outside looking in, I find it curious that they didn't just change Electron to do whatever magic they wanted it to do. Certainly they have the expertise and resources.
- hirsin 5y agoTeams was built on Electron a long time before Microsoft purchased Github.
- bastawhiz 5y agoDoes that matter? Microsoft employs probably all of the foremost experts on Electron right now. The decision to move away from electron didn't happen before Microsoft bought GitHub.
- dstaley 5y agoI think there's two reasons memory usage is lower. First, WebView2 is essentially just another tab in an already running browser process. If they're not pinning to a specific version of WebView2, they're reusing the host machine's copy of Edge, which I believe is always running now, so startup latency is reduced. I think their numbers don't include the memory usage of this "always on" instance, and only count the Teams-specific memory usage. Second, Microsoft has done a lot of under-the-hood work to reduce memory usage of Edge on Windows that hasn't made it upstream into Chromium, so I suspect that gives them an additional decrease in memory usage simply by switching from Chromium to Edge-Chromium.