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I don't get what's all the hate around Electron apps to be honest.

I run VS Code, Slack, Discord, Spotify (not Electron, but web tech) all the time and I don't see problems[1]. I mainly use a 7 year old mac, nothing too beefy.

No, I wouldn't like to use a website instead. But I don't crave an actual native app that much either.

[1] Perhaps apart from Discord always updating itself, but that's their decision.




The only example you provided that doesn't strictly need network based functionality for its core purpose is VS Code.

Slack, Discord and Spotify are all "web-based" to their core in the sense that they have an in-built client/server model as part of their core design and purpose. So in those examples, the only thing we have to complain about is the rendering / presentation layer.

And that kind of shifts the goalpost if you focus on those types of apps in my opinion.

Because my dislike for web apps is not strictly that they are using a browser-based presentation engine. If those UIs felt sluggish to me then I might choose to blame the underlying tech, but I wouldn't question it as much if they were not network-enabled applications in the first place (unless UI performance was a real pain and I thought they could perform better using something native).

The real issue for me is that our industry likes to chase trends like they are all or nothing. I don't like that every single application is moving to a web-based model whether or not it makes sense for that app. For the majority of my personal use, I don't need my applications to be network-enabled in the first place. I don't want them to sync to cloud storage, or provide collaboration features. I don't want to have to have an "account" with some SaaS company to use a word processor or a photo manipulation program.

I want my data local. I don't want my usage and data tracked. I don't want the app to stop working if my ISP has an outage and I don't want my data and app to disappear if the company goes out of business. I also don't like that web apps tend to see a much higher rate of UI changes pushed to the user. Software versions have largely disappeared for end-users and marketing. Now it's a continuous stream of pushed changes whether you chose to "upgrade" or not.


Slack has to be the clunkiest, slowest app I have ever used. It makes visual studio seem fast.

Electron apps are the hill I want to die on.

It is against hacker ethos, incredibly slow and bloated, and teaches devs features are the only thing which matters and not how much memory or cpu runtime it uses.




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