Thank you for saying this. I’m seeing this thinking, have people used native apps recently? They’re not as great as people say. Have they tried coding a UI in a native library instead of the holy HTML CSS JS trifecta? It’s usually fairly miserable and usually extremely non-customizable by comparison.
All this hating on Electron, hating on UE5, etc. really rubs me the wrong way. Firstly because people talk about optimization and “the good old days” while ignoring that we have completely different requirements these days. The new Witcher game isn’t fucking Quake. It’s gonna use some hardware. What do you want people to do? Implement custom rendering engines for every game? That’s the same as saying you want less games, because most teams literally cannot do that for various reasons, and the same applies to the Electron apps.
Like, I get it. Things should be optimized. But I feel like “software is unoptimized now” is mostly a meme propagated by tech and gaming YouTubers who don’t really know what they’re talking about, through an audience of wannabes who don’t really know what they’re talking about. People whining about le yandere dev toothbrush!1!1! And le undertale dialogue if statements!1!1!. E.g I remember hearing people saying that because borderlands has a cel-shaded effect it should be cheaper to render - a completely wrong and backwards statement.
It’s incredible how gamers think they understand rendering technology just because they play a lot of video games. And similarly I don’t like when developers (and probably a lot of non-developers) make a lot of assumptions about other people’s apps. See the complaints about Spotify memory usage. We don’t know anything about how Spotify works internally. There could be an algorithm running to determine which songs to queue up next which is analyzing multiple songs at once, or all sorts of other things. It’s so presumptuous to just look at an app in Task Manager and be like “pathetic, I could do better”, especially if it runs without problems on your device. And maybe it is built with Electron? So what? That just means that you’re paying some RAM in order to get an always updated UI that is matching what you get everywhere else. Like are we just gonna neglect that Electron provides a basically fully homogenous experience across all platforms with no extra code needed? We’re just gonna act like that’s worth nothing? It’s so entitled to say “nooooo I need you to spend an extra $2M/yr paying a Windows 8 UI dev team so that the Windows 8 Native App can have a full ten years of service and it can use 80 MB instead of 1 GB of RAM so that way I can also use this app and 200 other glorious native apps all simultaneously but also I don’t want to pay any more for the product and I don’t care if you’re a solo developer because back in my day solo developers authored papers about their custom algorithms and if you don’t do that but with my new 100x more demanding requirements you’re trash”.
Have they tried coding a UI in a native library instead of the holy HTML CSS JS trifecta? It’s usually fairly miserable and usually extremely non-customizable by comparison.
🙋♂️ I have. Exactly because Electron = bloat. Granted it was just a small side project that I spent like a month or so building. I wanted to learn GTK4, Adwaita, GNOME Blueprints, and Vala.
I personally didn’t think it was too miserable (again small project, not a ton of specialized needs). However, I 10000% completely agree with the “extremely non-customizable by comparison”. I can totally see why companies don’t want to look like a generic OS app. Getting the Bitwarden app to look like Bitwarden on Linux seems like it would be waaay harder and more time consuming than just reusing their existing HTML, CSS, and JS codebase. At least in my month of messing with GTK, it seems like desktop UIs have wwwwaaaaayyyyyyy less control over the UI than webapps do, at least by default. I’m guessing you can write more Vala to get a more custom UI in GTK, but again seems like waaaaayy more work for something highly custom.
By the end, I thought: Electron = bloat, but also Electron = apps existing at all.
Thank you for saying this. I’m seeing this thinking, have people used native apps recently? They’re not as great as people say. Have they tried coding a UI in a native library instead of the holy HTML CSS JS trifecta? It’s usually fairly miserable and usually extremely non-customizable by comparison.
All this hating on Electron, hating on UE5, etc. really rubs me the wrong way. Firstly because people talk about optimization and “the good old days” while ignoring that we have completely different requirements these days. The new Witcher game isn’t fucking Quake. It’s gonna use some hardware. What do you want people to do? Implement custom rendering engines for every game? That’s the same as saying you want less games, because most teams literally cannot do that for various reasons, and the same applies to the Electron apps.
Like, I get it. Things should be optimized. But I feel like “software is unoptimized now” is mostly a meme propagated by tech and gaming YouTubers who don’t really know what they’re talking about, through an audience of wannabes who don’t really know what they’re talking about. People whining about le yandere dev toothbrush!1!1! And le undertale dialogue if statements!1!1!. E.g I remember hearing people saying that because borderlands has a cel-shaded effect it should be cheaper to render - a completely wrong and backwards statement.
It’s incredible how gamers think they understand rendering technology just because they play a lot of video games. And similarly I don’t like when developers (and probably a lot of non-developers) make a lot of assumptions about other people’s apps. See the complaints about Spotify memory usage. We don’t know anything about how Spotify works internally. There could be an algorithm running to determine which songs to queue up next which is analyzing multiple songs at once, or all sorts of other things. It’s so presumptuous to just look at an app in Task Manager and be like “pathetic, I could do better”, especially if it runs without problems on your device. And maybe it is built with Electron? So what? That just means that you’re paying some RAM in order to get an always updated UI that is matching what you get everywhere else. Like are we just gonna neglect that Electron provides a basically fully homogenous experience across all platforms with no extra code needed? We’re just gonna act like that’s worth nothing? It’s so entitled to say “nooooo I need you to spend an extra $2M/yr paying a Windows 8 UI dev team so that the Windows 8 Native App can have a full ten years of service and it can use 80 MB instead of 1 GB of RAM so that way I can also use this app and 200 other glorious native apps all simultaneously but also I don’t want to pay any more for the product and I don’t care if you’re a solo developer because back in my day solo developers authored papers about their custom algorithms and if you don’t do that but with my new 100x more demanding requirements you’re trash”.
🙋♂️ I have. Exactly because Electron = bloat. Granted it was just a small side project that I spent like a month or so building. I wanted to learn GTK4, Adwaita, GNOME Blueprints, and Vala.
I personally didn’t think it was too miserable (again small project, not a ton of specialized needs). However, I 10000% completely agree with the “extremely non-customizable by comparison”. I can totally see why companies don’t want to look like a generic OS app. Getting the Bitwarden app to look like Bitwarden on Linux seems like it would be waaay harder and more time consuming than just reusing their existing HTML, CSS, and JS codebase. At least in my month of messing with GTK, it seems like desktop UIs have wwwwaaaaayyyyyyy less control over the UI than webapps do, at least by default. I’m guessing you can write more Vala to get a more custom UI in GTK, but again seems like waaaaayy more work for something highly custom.
By the end, I thought: Electron = bloat, but also Electron = apps existing at all.