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People hate on electron, but it's a pretty amazing piece of tech if you ask me. I can turn a browser game into a steam game with basically no effort which is ni

by umvi 4y ago

People hate on electron, but it's a pretty amazing piece of tech if you ask me. I can turn a browser game into a steam game with basically no effort which is nice because browsers change over time and electron helps you get a working offline snapshot of something you created.

seba_dos1 4y ago
> I can turn a browser game into a steam game with basically no effort There's actually quite a lot of effort required if you want Steam overlay to work and/or not crash with Electron, or to interact with Steamworks APIs.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dijit 4y ago
But what value is that, over the website?
- drdeca 4y ago
  “ because browsers change over time and electron helps you get a working offline snapshot of something you created.” If the browsers change in a way that makes the website not work, the electron application will still work.
  - csande17 4y ago
    This makes sense from the perspective of the individual developer, but it's also a sad reflection of the sorry state of technology that the only way to be sure a website will work in 5 years is by shipping your own copy of the browser.
- dmitryminkovsky 4y ago
  > which is nice because browsers change over time and electron helps you get a working offline snapshot of something you created.
- tikhonj 4y ago
  Two big ones I can think of: 1. Have your application look and act like a standalone application rather than a webpage—Chrome tried to support this with application shortcuts (or whatever they were called), but it never worked well enough 2. Give your application access to native APIs and capabilities that you can't get through the browser, like direct filesystem access
  - kiratp 4y ago
    But it doesn’t act like an application. Most of the OS right click services, keyboard shortcuts, menu items are all missing. Accessibility tools don’t work.
    - smaudet 4y ago
      It doesn't feel like one either. It feels like a shitty web page, and it costs 500$ to run. I can run apps in python and they don't feel the same way, never mind native.
  - Qwertious 4y ago
    >1. Have your application look and act like a standalone application rather than a webpage That sounds suspiciously like "properly adheres to the native OS's conventions", the lack of which is the #1 criticism of electron.
    - JoeyJoJoJr 4y ago
      They are talking in the context of games though, for which there aren’t such strong conventions, besides lives in your applications folder, and runs full screen.
p-e-w 4y ago
Electron is essentially an operating system that runs on every operating system, so you can target just a single OS and your application works everywhere.
- rob74 4y ago
  Yes, and that's exactly what people hate about it: every application written in Electron lugs around its own copy of this OS. You can imagine why this might not be a good idea, especially for applications designed to run in the background, like the Slack client. For me, it was a godsend when Slack decided that my Linux version was too old to support and the client stopped working. Then I switched to the in-browser version and never looked back, even after upgrading to a new machine. My laptop's CPU and memory usage are still thanking me...
  - imbnwa 4y ago
    I strictly run Teams, Slack, Discord, and Spotify in pinned browser tabs
  - smaudet 4y ago
    Teams holds the crown as far as terrible electron apps. I actually can't run it locally (absurd tech policies), and I am so glad to never run it at all ever. Just easier to load it into an isolated browser tab when I need it, Zoom is so superior it's not even funny...
  - jiggywiggy 4y ago
    Thought the same. So was using teams and slack in the browser. But at least for new m1 Mac, resources for running a tab and a seperate electron app are pretty similar. It's scary how much memory certain latent tabs use, especially with video ads running.
  - ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
    With regards to various applications, the question seems it is not if Electron is fit for them, but if they really need to be a "native application". Why does a chat application need to have it's own native package and can't run in a browser tab? With all the recent development on WebRTC and even File System Access API, can't really find a sole reason* (but feel free to point them out) for 99% of Electron applications: seems some kind of developer ego "we are not just a[nother] web app, we are native". * Looking at an arbitrary article, "Why does Slack desktop app use Electron?" [1], the answer seems mostly aesthetics, "faster performance [citation needed] and the frameless look". [1] https://brainhub.eu/library/electron-app-examples#:~:text=Why%20does%20Slack%20desktop%20app%20use%20Electron%3F https://brainhub.eu/library/electron-app-examples#:~:text=Wh...
philliphaydon 4y ago
> People hate on electron, but it's a pretty amazing piece of tech if you ask me. It really does come down to how people build on top of it. I tried opening a 2gb log file in Atom and it took like 10 minutes before crashing. VSCode on the other hand, while a bit slow, opened it and I could search quickly and scroll it without any issue at all. That was what caused me to switch.
- PetahNZ 4y ago
  Opening large files is a pretty niche case anyway. Even CLI tools like less and grep are slow with things like searching muti GB files.
  - dmitrygr 4y ago
    > Even CLI tools like less and grep are slow with things like searching muti GB files. In what universe? I routinely use "less -n" to open terabyte-sized text files.
    - mkl 4y ago
      In what context do you have terabyte-sized text files?
  - chaxor 4y ago
    /s here you forgot this
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- danielbarla 4y ago
  Your specific example highlights the performance difference between VS Code and Atom very nicely, and VS Code is an absolute gem of engineering. But, for large files, I am not sure it has much to do with Electron in this specific case. Notepad is about as native as they come, and famously struggled with large files - anything over a few dozen KB - for a few decades (maybe still today?). Basically, if you're going to do seriously stupid stuff in an app's code, like loading the entire file upfront and applying word-wrapping, it doesn't really matter if you're doing it 2-5x faster, it will still take too long.
pdntspa 4y ago
The people that hate on Electron aren't amused by cute browser tricks.
pjmlp 4y ago
Microsoft and Mozilla did it first, nothing great about Electron, other than shipping Chrome even into more computers.
- jamesfmilne 4y ago
  I believe the Komodo IDE was written on top of xulrunner, which used the internals of Mozilla/Firefox.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Yes it was. https://www.activestate.com/blog/activestate-komodo-ide-now-open-source/ https://www.activestate.com/blog/activestate-komodo-ide-now-...
innocenat 4y ago
There was node-webkit (nowadays called nw.js) that predate electron by quite some times. I remember know about it precisely because I was playing games that was developed with it.
herbst 4y ago
I don't think that people actually hate on electron. It's more that we hate on tiny tools written in electron. A small usb stick copy tool? here take 300mb and more to get the 1 minute job done. A bash one liner.

by umvi 4y ago

seba_dos1 4y ago

> I can turn a browser game into a steam game with basically no effort There's actually quite a lot of effort required if you want Steam overlay to work and/or not crash with Electron, or to interact with Steamworks APIs.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

dijit 4y ago

But what value is that, over the website?

drdeca 4y ago
“ because browsers change over time and electron helps you get a working offline snapshot of something you created.” If the browsers change in a way that makes the website not work, the electron application will still work.
- csande17 4y ago
  This makes sense from the perspective of the individual developer, but it's also a sad reflection of the sorry state of technology that the only way to be sure a website will work in 5 years is by shipping your own copy of the browser.
dmitryminkovsky 4y ago
> which is nice because browsers change over time and electron helps you get a working offline snapshot of something you created.
tikhonj 4y ago
Two big ones I can think of: 1. Have your application look and act like a standalone application rather than a webpage—Chrome tried to support this with application shortcuts (or whatever they were called), but it never worked well enough 2. Give your application access to native APIs and capabilities that you can't get through the browser, like direct filesystem access
- kiratp 4y ago
  But it doesn’t act like an application. Most of the OS right click services, keyboard shortcuts, menu items are all missing. Accessibility tools don’t work.
  - smaudet 4y ago
    It doesn't feel like one either. It feels like a shitty web page, and it costs 500$ to run. I can run apps in python and they don't feel the same way, never mind native.
- Qwertious 4y ago
  >1. Have your application look and act like a standalone application rather than a webpage That sounds suspiciously like "properly adheres to the native OS's conventions", the lack of which is the #1 criticism of electron.
  - JoeyJoJoJr 4y ago
    They are talking in the context of games though, for which there aren’t such strong conventions, besides lives in your applications folder, and runs full screen.

p-e-w 4y ago

Electron is essentially an operating system that runs on every operating system, so you can target just a single OS and your application works everywhere.

rob74 4y ago
Yes, and that's exactly what people hate about it: every application written in Electron lugs around its own copy of this OS. You can imagine why this might not be a good idea, especially for applications designed to run in the background, like the Slack client. For me, it was a godsend when Slack decided that my Linux version was too old to support and the client stopped working. Then I switched to the in-browser version and never looked back, even after upgrading to a new machine. My laptop's CPU and memory usage are still thanking me...
- imbnwa 4y ago
  I strictly run Teams, Slack, Discord, and Spotify in pinned browser tabs
- smaudet 4y ago
  Teams holds the crown as far as terrible electron apps. I actually can't run it locally (absurd tech policies), and I am so glad to never run it at all ever. Just easier to load it into an isolated browser tab when I need it, Zoom is so superior it's not even funny...
- jiggywiggy 4y ago
  Thought the same. So was using teams and slack in the browser. But at least for new m1 Mac, resources for running a tab and a seperate electron app are pretty similar. It's scary how much memory certain latent tabs use, especially with video ads running.
- ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
  With regards to various applications, the question seems it is not if Electron is fit for them, but if they really need to be a "native application". Why does a chat application need to have it's own native package and can't run in a browser tab? With all the recent development on WebRTC and even File System Access API, can't really find a sole reason* (but feel free to point them out) for 99% of Electron applications: seems some kind of developer ego "we are not just a[nother] web app, we are native". * Looking at an arbitrary article, "Why does Slack desktop app use Electron?" [1], the answer seems mostly aesthetics, "faster performance [citation needed] and the frameless look". [1] https://brainhub.eu/library/electron-app-examples#:~:text=Why%20does%20Slack%20desktop%20app%20use%20Electron%3F https://brainhub.eu/library/electron-app-examples#:~:text=Wh...

philliphaydon 4y ago

> People hate on electron, but it's a pretty amazing piece of tech if you ask me. It really does come down to how people build on top of it. I tried opening a 2gb log file in Atom and it took like 10 minutes before crashing. VSCode on the other hand, while a bit slow, opened it and I could search quickly and scroll it without any issue at all. That was what caused me to switch.

PetahNZ 4y ago
Opening large files is a pretty niche case anyway. Even CLI tools like less and grep are slow with things like searching muti GB files.
- dmitrygr 4y ago
  > Even CLI tools like less and grep are slow with things like searching muti GB files. In what universe? I routinely use "less -n" to open terabyte-sized text files.
  - mkl 4y ago
    In what context do you have terabyte-sized text files?
- chaxor 4y ago
  /s here you forgot this
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
danielbarla 4y ago
Your specific example highlights the performance difference between VS Code and Atom very nicely, and VS Code is an absolute gem of engineering. But, for large files, I am not sure it has much to do with Electron in this specific case. Notepad is about as native as they come, and famously struggled with large files - anything over a few dozen KB - for a few decades (maybe still today?). Basically, if you're going to do seriously stupid stuff in an app's code, like loading the entire file upfront and applying word-wrapping, it doesn't really matter if you're doing it 2-5x faster, it will still take too long.

pdntspa 4y ago

The people that hate on Electron aren't amused by cute browser tricks.

pjmlp 4y ago

Microsoft and Mozilla did it first, nothing great about Electron, other than shipping Chrome even into more computers.

jamesfmilne 4y ago
I believe the Komodo IDE was written on top of xulrunner, which used the internals of Mozilla/Firefox.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Yes it was. https://www.activestate.com/blog/activestate-komodo-ide-now-open-source/ https://www.activestate.com/blog/activestate-komodo-ide-now-...

innocenat 4y ago

There was node-webkit (nowadays called nw.js) that predate electron by quite some times. I remember know about it precisely because I was playing games that was developed with it.

herbst 4y ago

I don't think that people actually hate on electron. It's more that we hate on tiny tools written in electron. A small usb stick copy tool? here take 300mb and more to get the 1 minute job done. A bash one liner.