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The expectations of apps have skyrocketed too which is why everyone is using Electron to cope. If GUI development were still as easy as the drag and drop builde

The expectations of apps have skyrocketed too which is why everyone is using Electron to cope. If GUI development were still as easy as the drag and drop builders in Delphi 7 and VB6 with a bunch of static 800x600 monitors and double-click to edit component code-behind, we’d be shoehorning fewer apps into HTML and making more desktop apps. I remember how big of a pain in the ass Windows distribution (alone) was in the 2000s with entire businesses like InstallShield built around it. Tack compatibility testing on top of that and a desktop app for a single OS because a massive effort. With the web you could just upload PHP and off to the race. That slowly evolved into what we had today via jquery and electron and friends but what won was distribution and ease of development, despite all the handwringing people do about frontend. The grass isn’t greener on the other side and hasn’t been for decades. It’s not even remotely competitive anymore. My favorite example is GoldenLayout: it takes me less than a few hours to read the docs and implement a full blown tabbed and split screen interface using a third party library and combine it with any framework I want like React, Svelte, or just vanilla JS. Each desktop framework have their own solutions to the problem usually in the form of commercial components but even in the best case, they take lots more time to wire together.

hnlmorg 3y ago
I was writing resizeable desktop applications in the 90s and it was easy then too. Differing screen resolutions is not a recent thing. The reason for Electron's popularity is because: 1. web developers are cheaper and easier to hire than people with desktop software development experience 2. Electron is cross platform Point 2 is a compelling reason. But it's not like other cross platform toolkits haven't existed. They've just been left to languish because of point 1. If companies only hire web developers then of course everyone is going to invest time into writing Electron apps and banging on about the benefits of web applications. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. I say this with experience having watched the tides turn, first hand, as a software developer.
- civilitty 3y ago
  I was there too with a Sony GDM-FW900 monitor with 2300x1400 resolution and my experience was very negative. Both as a user and as a developer (though I was just a kid getting started in ‘99). Any software that wasn’t made by a major company was a crapshoot and Delphi layout was brittle for my own apps. Anything that got deployed to university computers with their bulk purchased monitors was mostly fine except for the deployment process. There are more web developers because it was a lot easier, even before npm existed and frontend frameworks went out of control. That’d didn’t happen in a vacuum - Electron was really late on the scene as far as frontend tech goes. It was originally made to support an IDE and not regular business apps and still won.
  - hnlmorg 3y ago
    > I was there too with a Sony GDM-FW900 monitor I’m talking about the early to mid 90s of web development and you reply with a monitor released around 2000. That’s a completely different era. > with 2300x1400 resolution and my experience was very negative. That’s more an issue with OSs not doing scaling back then than it is a problem with desktop software. You’d still have the same issue today if you run a super high resolution with zero scaling. > There are more web developers because it was a lot easier It’s has a lower barrier for entry but I wouldn’t call it easier. > even before […] frontend frameworks went out of control. So you’re basically agreeing with me then. The current state of affairs is out of control. > Electron was really late on the scene as far as frontend tech goes. It was originally made to support an IDE and not regular business apps and still won. Its origins doesn’t disprove my point. Lots of things start out as one thing and evolve into something else. That isn’t unique to the web nor Electron.
    - civilitty 3y ago
      I thought we were talking about "resizeable desktop applications in the 90s"? The reason I bring up that monitor is that I had the misfortune of using dozens of desktop applications written in the 90s to control lab equipment and spent copious amounts of time manually tiling them in all kinds of positions and sizes on a high resolution monitor. Scaling was definitely not the issue thanks to great eyesight. I was lucky if they supported a non 4:3 aspect ratio. Anything that wasn't a graphical or CAD or other app that did its own rendering or was developed by a large dev team was a crapshoot. Lots of absolutely positioned buttons clipped by a resize, toolbars that didn't hide their buttons behind a menu when the window was too small, uncollapsible panels with minimum widths that exceeded the main content, and so on. Most of them were about as resizable as a water balloon when you smash it on the ground.

hnlmorg 3y ago

I was writing resizeable desktop applications in the 90s and it was easy then too. Differing screen resolutions is not a recent thing. The reason for Electron's popularity is because: 1. web developers are cheaper and easier to hire than people with desktop software development experience 2. Electron is cross platform Point 2 is a compelling reason. But it's not like other cross platform toolkits haven't existed. They've just been left to languish because of point 1. If companies only hire web developers then of course everyone is going to invest time into writing Electron apps and banging on about the benefits of web applications. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. I say this with experience having watched the tides turn, first hand, as a software developer.

civilitty 3y ago
I was there too with a Sony GDM-FW900 monitor with 2300x1400 resolution and my experience was very negative. Both as a user and as a developer (though I was just a kid getting started in ‘99). Any software that wasn’t made by a major company was a crapshoot and Delphi layout was brittle for my own apps. Anything that got deployed to university computers with their bulk purchased monitors was mostly fine except for the deployment process. There are more web developers because it was a lot easier, even before npm existed and frontend frameworks went out of control. That’d didn’t happen in a vacuum - Electron was really late on the scene as far as frontend tech goes. It was originally made to support an IDE and not regular business apps and still won.
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  > I was there too with a Sony GDM-FW900 monitor I’m talking about the early to mid 90s of web development and you reply with a monitor released around 2000. That’s a completely different era. > with 2300x1400 resolution and my experience was very negative. That’s more an issue with OSs not doing scaling back then than it is a problem with desktop software. You’d still have the same issue today if you run a super high resolution with zero scaling. > There are more web developers because it was a lot easier It’s has a lower barrier for entry but I wouldn’t call it easier. > even before […] frontend frameworks went out of control. So you’re basically agreeing with me then. The current state of affairs is out of control. > Electron was really late on the scene as far as frontend tech goes. It was originally made to support an IDE and not regular business apps and still won. Its origins doesn’t disprove my point. Lots of things start out as one thing and evolve into something else. That isn’t unique to the web nor Electron.
  - civilitty 3y ago
    I thought we were talking about "resizeable desktop applications in the 90s"? The reason I bring up that monitor is that I had the misfortune of using dozens of desktop applications written in the 90s to control lab equipment and spent copious amounts of time manually tiling them in all kinds of positions and sizes on a high resolution monitor. Scaling was definitely not the issue thanks to great eyesight. I was lucky if they supported a non 4:3 aspect ratio. Anything that wasn't a graphical or CAD or other app that did its own rendering or was developed by a large dev team was a crapshoot. Lots of absolutely positioned buttons clipped by a resize, toolbars that didn't hide their buttons behind a menu when the window was too small, uncollapsible panels with minimum widths that exceeded the main content, and so on. Most of them were about as resizable as a water balloon when you smash it on the ground.