ELECTRON: why people HATE it, why devs USE it

First, electron doesn't integrate really well with the operating system: it's just a web browser displaying a website that is stored on your computer instead of being stored on a server. This means that if electron doesn't support a specific feature of your operating system, the apps using it also won't. A bigger problem, though, is the fact that developers often don't update the electron base, or not often enough. Electron, using CHromium, needs to be as up to date as any web browser you'd use everyday, to ensure that security flaws are patched. … And then there's the performance and resource usage. Since electron apps ship basically the whole of chromium's codebase, they aren't small. Discord, for example, once installed, weighs more than 700 MB. Almost a gigabyte. Even the most basic of Hello World applications would take about 100MB, just to display a line of text. … ### Transcript {ts:0} hey everyone this is nick and if there's one technology that is divisive between ... {ts:13} it as a desktop app and while it has many advantages for developers it also has many issues for their users so let's … {ts:324} snap store and everything is generally pretty fast but on mac os or windows the review process can take days so if you {ts:330} have a critical bug fix for your users you would probably prefer if that fix was deployed immediately as it's ready {ts:338} of course it also means that developers can push whatever they want to users without any control from the platform … {ts:386} platform they don't have to waste time re-implementing stuff and it also kind of lets them bypass the store updates {ts:392} policies which companies tend to like so generally for companies electron is a win {ts:398} but electron also has a lot of issues while it generally makes the developer's life easier for the user it's less … {ts:425} won't for example electron discontinued support for 32-bit systems so if you have an older computer none of these {ts:433} electron apps will work even though the website itself would work perfectly well since the application also doesn't use a {ts:440} native toolkit like gtk or cute on linux it also won't respect your theme your accent color your icon theme your header … {ts:489} guidelines in the same sentence just doesn't feel right at all now of course that's not something that will bother {ts:496} everyone some people are fine with using apps that don't look or feel the same and that's okay too a bigger problem {ts:503} though is that while it's pretty easy to update the content of the app the website part of the application a lot of {ts:510} developers don't generally update the electron part of their application see when you create an electron app you have {ts:517} basically two code bases your web app and electron and both should be updated regularly because electron using {ts:525} chromium needs to be as up-to-date as any web browser you would use every day to ensure that security flaws are … {ts:552} updating the electron version they use deprive users of that support so on wayland discord doesn't support screen {ts:560} sharing or when you use the flat pack version it doesn't support file portals so in the end you can't share your {ts:566} screen with other people and when you try to open a file to upload for example you will always get the gtk file picker … {ts:616} and then there's the performance and resource usage since electron apps ship basically the {ts:622} whole of chromium's code base they aren't small discord for example once installed {ts:628} weighs more than 700 megabytes almost a gigabyte even the most basic of hello world {ts:634} applications would take about a hundred megabytes just to display a line of text the size usage is extremely high if you … {ts:755} people mainly because of this specific reason developers either assume users will run {ts:761} their app and their app only all that all users have really high-end systems with a lot of ram and cpu cycles {ts:768} it prevents good optimization because there's always that incompressible chromium part that you cannot control as