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One nice thing about targeting a web engine is that your application could potentially run in browsers too. Lots of Electron applications do this. Also you get

One nice thing about targeting a web engine is that your application could potentially run in browsers too. Lots of Electron applications do this. Also you get to take advantage of the massive amount of effort that goes into web engines for accessibility, cross-platform consistency, and performance. Electron is a memory hog, but actually very powerful and productive. There’s a reason why VSCode, Discord, and many others use it. But yeah, I wouldn’t say no to a native Rust desktop stack similar to Qt. I know there are options at various levels of sophistication that I’m curious about but haven’t explored in depth.

niutech 1y ago
If it runs in a web browser, why bother Electron if you can just install a standalone web app in Chromium-based browsers (or Firefox with PWA extension)? I do this with Slack, Teams, Discord, Gmail and they use less RAM since they reuse a shared web engine.
- brokencode 1y ago
  Some applications benefit from the host integration. VSCode in particular, since it interacts with the terminal and other applications. I'm also assuming 1Password benefits from it as well for full OS integration.
  - niutech 11mo ago
    But then they don't need to be made as Electron apps, but rather native apps, which use a fraction of resources. Compare e.g. Sublime Text or Notepad++ with VS Code.
    - brokencode 11mo ago
      But then they wouldn’t work in the browser. There’s certainly a place for truly native apps, but there are also a lot of reasons companies keep picking Electron. Efficiency is just one consideration.
      - niutech 11mo ago
        They could, using Wasm, like Qt, Blazor Hybrid, Uno Platform, Avalonia.FuncUI. Electron is efficient for devs, but inefficient for users, being a memory hog, especially on low end devices.
        brokencode 11mo ago
        They could do that today, but do they? I can’t name one app that uses one of those to run in a browser. I can name multiple highly successful apps that use Electron. I seriously doubt the approach of running a native desktop application in the browser would give you performance or usability as good as running an actual web app.

niutech 1y ago

If it runs in a web browser, why bother Electron if you can just install a standalone web app in Chromium-based browsers (or Firefox with PWA extension)? I do this with Slack, Teams, Discord, Gmail and they use less RAM since they reuse a shared web engine.

brokencode 1y ago
Some applications benefit from the host integration. VSCode in particular, since it interacts with the terminal and other applications. I'm also assuming 1Password benefits from it as well for full OS integration.
- niutech 11mo ago
  But then they don't need to be made as Electron apps, but rather native apps, which use a fraction of resources. Compare e.g. Sublime Text or Notepad++ with VS Code.
  - brokencode 11mo ago
    But then they wouldn’t work in the browser. There’s certainly a place for truly native apps, but there are also a lot of reasons companies keep picking Electron. Efficiency is just one consideration.
    - niutech 11mo ago
      They could, using Wasm, like Qt, Blazor Hybrid, Uno Platform, Avalonia.FuncUI. Electron is efficient for devs, but inefficient for users, being a memory hog, especially on low end devices.
      - brokencode 11mo ago
        They could do that today, but do they? I can’t name one app that uses one of those to run in a browser. I can name multiple highly successful apps that use Electron. I seriously doubt the approach of running a native desktop application in the browser would give you performance or usability as good as running an actual web app.