3 ms·

> It is mostly that the latest trend is to ship software with their entire run time environment. I think this is a side effect of the main trend, which is writ

> It is mostly that the latest trend is to ship software with their entire run time environment. I think this is a side effect of the main trend, which is write once, run anywhere. There are a handful of frameworks aiming to do that, and it is difficult to accomplish and rely on native APIs. Also, I’d suggest it’s a trend for economic reasons rather than because people think electron is technically superior to native APIs. The economic reason is that even a medium/large company can just hire a sole developer or two to spin up an electron app that loads an existing web application and it works everywhere and is “good enough.” The alternative is hiring lots of people to build a native app that users only might think is better. I don’t think most electron examples are because people wanted a technically superior solution to native applications.

GuB-42 5y ago
Writing apps for the browser is one thing, I don't particularly like it because it lacks the level of integration native apps have but for performance, it is not that bad. Browsers are well optimized and offer many interesting features out of the box. For me, the problem is that an Electron app ships with its own browser instead of using the one the system already has. Another example, mostly in the Linux world, is to use containers with their own subsystems instead of using system libraries. Snap, AppImage and Flatpak do that, especially Snap, which I think is the only one that doesn't support external dependencies. I understand the appeal, but that's really wasteful.