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> We all know how browser-based web apps tend to feel. Things lag, they’re inconsistent, you’re never sure whether stuff like copy & paste or drag & drop is goi

> We all know how browser-based web apps tend to feel. Things lag, they’re inconsistent, you’re never sure whether stuff like copy & paste or drag & drop is going to work, you’re not sure where (or if) your work is getting saved, the list goes on. This has not been my experience with Electron apps at all. > An app that’s under 20MB is very lean. Apps over 100MB better have a good reason for being so big, and apps above 500MB are probably bloated, unless they’re games or legitimate mega-apps like Photoshop or Final Cut Pro. Smaller is better, surely. But outside of gaming computers and embedded software, how often are most people really scraping together megabytes of disk space to store their 200MB applications? Not very often, is my anecdotal experience. > While they’re running they also take up RAM (memory,) and use CPU processing power. Sure, I won't argue at all here. This one hurts a bit sometimes. I suppose it more so hurts people running low end hardware. This might get filed under my list of "hot takes," but rarely, if ever, is my computer slogging and I open up htop or Task Manager and discover it's some Electron app swallowing my system resources. So I find a lot of the anti-Electron arguments to be a bit exaggerative.

rubymamis 3y ago
That's exactly the problem, tho - our hardware is playing a game of tag with bloated software, it always needs to keep up with the newest bloat. Buy, why? My computer is extremely capable already, why not use its resources efficiently to get the best out of it? I'm building an advanced block editor (like Notion) in Qt C++. It takes 0.78seconds to load War and Peace on my 2016 MacBook Air. Using the top of the line Electron app (MarkText) takes 34x longer! Also, the same text loaded using the best native macOS app (Bike Outliner), on a 2022 M1 Pro takes 1.5seconds. So, my 2016 MacBook Air is "faster" than 2022 M1 Pro just due to more efficient software.
- starttoaster 3y ago
  > it always needs to keep up with the newest bloat. Buy, why? Because there exists tools that make it easier to ship a good software product to the market, and without these tools, there are many software products that would simply not exist because of the much more prohibitive cost of developing bespoke applications for every platform you want to support. And the flipside to that predicament, not supporting everyone in your target market because you only developed one of the apps you need to develop. There is a trade off. You aren't getting nothing out of the bargain. Maybe you noticed, but this blog post we're commenting on is actually an advertisement for a software product that only supports MacOS. Seem a bit ironic, doesn't it? I wonder if leveraging Electron might make it simpler to add support for Windows or Linux systems.

rubymamis 3y ago

That's exactly the problem, tho - our hardware is playing a game of tag with bloated software, it always needs to keep up with the newest bloat. Buy, why? My computer is extremely capable already, why not use its resources efficiently to get the best out of it? I'm building an advanced block editor (like Notion) in Qt C++. It takes 0.78seconds to load War and Peace on my 2016 MacBook Air. Using the top of the line Electron app (MarkText) takes 34x longer! Also, the same text loaded using the best native macOS app (Bike Outliner), on a 2022 M1 Pro takes 1.5seconds. So, my 2016 MacBook Air is "faster" than 2022 M1 Pro just due to more efficient software.

starttoaster 3y ago
> it always needs to keep up with the newest bloat. Buy, why? Because there exists tools that make it easier to ship a good software product to the market, and without these tools, there are many software products that would simply not exist because of the much more prohibitive cost of developing bespoke applications for every platform you want to support. And the flipside to that predicament, not supporting everyone in your target market because you only developed one of the apps you need to develop. There is a trade off. You aren't getting nothing out of the bargain. Maybe you noticed, but this blog post we're commenting on is actually an advertisement for a software product that only supports MacOS. Seem a bit ironic, doesn't it? I wonder if leveraging Electron might make it simpler to add support for Windows or Linux systems.