My poor RAM...

Isn't this about performance and not storage?

Making and managing an electron app is easier, but it is possible (with more work) to have clean install/uninstall, a nice UI, and consistent regular updates while still being fast and efficient.

Better programs will always need more work to create.

I am curious about what other options there are, and why Electron is what a lot of people go with.

You ever notice how everything installs and uninstalls super cleanly and easily these days and software gets consistent regular updates?

Not really. Well maybe I take it for granted having switched to Linux.

I mostly hate Electron for the dumb RAM usage.

Pretty sure that's more about a switch from physical distribution where storage is expensive (CDs) to digital where it's cheap.

Teams is truly exceptional, more so because the same company has VSCode.

Both show the inherent lag and sluggishness of Electron apps, but they're on totally opposite ends of the spectrum. Which is wild. It's like a case study or something.

Tauri moment

I will say that unless something's changed in Windows recently, the win32 API webview is still a vestigial version of internet explorer due to Microsoft's obsession with non breaking changes (not saying that's a bad thing)

Given I lived through those years as an engineer, I completely understand people wanting to avoid that particular ancient eldritch horror.

Edit: apparently there's webview2 now based on edge (and therefore chromium), I take it all back

I mean even for something like .NET, apps install the version of the runtime they need in a shared space, so that they can be used by everyone desiring that specific version.

The argument is better if the app is written with Ionic.

When I worked support for an android device manufacturer I had some strange issues with other apps that were resolved by clearing the cache in Chrome. Its all webpages all the way up and down baby!

Except each container has its own libc and any other dependencies. If any linked binary or library has a different inode, it gets loaded separately. I would say it is indeed quite similar, even if the images in question here aren't hundreds of megabytes in size like with Electron.

Still the same issue of a still pretty big overhead that is unnecessary in the vast majority of situations.

At my current workpalce, ~20% of hardware goes to docker. Is it still worth it? For the company it is I assume, since we can let developers with fuck all operations experience deploy stuff without bricking our servers. But we could also be hiring operations people who know how to run applications on servers without fucking them up, but of course in a money game docker wins out for ease and speed.

Importantly, comparing stuff like Electron though, we can scale up the hardware and that's included in the cost of running docker. Desktop users stuck with shit like VSCode, Beekeeper or Mongo Compass can't realistically do that though, PC upgrades aren't something you do in 10 minutes and even then your options are limited.

So for companies and servers, docker makes a lot of sense. Especially on the business side. For a private end user, these virtualization tools remove the potential performance all that fancy hardware nowadays could provide. And in the case of Electron shit, they also make for a worse inconsistent UI and laggy interactions.

Preach it.

What else works across as many platforms and screen sizes as well as the combination of HTML/CSS/JS?

Doom. It runs on every-fucking-thing

Maybe I do not specify clearly what I mean.

Why to order taxi, access bank, register a domain name do we have to have apps on all platforms and then to fix this problem we bloat the web by creating webapps. Why not just plain simple HTML website beautified with CSS instead?

Real cross-platform apps are those written in, for example QT. Then came Android and iOS forcing everyone to use their toolkits so we started to abuse poor web.

yes. i used eframe/egui in rust, which builds to native. not saying its the best framework, but def better than el*ctron

Lmao, need more title bars to match macOS' 90s aesthetic?

Uh huh. Electron apps look good on Windows. Sure.

No electron app ever looks good anywhere. They are consistent insofar that they look shit on all OS, equally. And alias their fonts wrong. And scale them wrong. And break accessibility.

Native apps have the potential to be better than electron apps for sure. I get that.

This is a surface level thing though - the question is: would THIS app, written by THAT organisation be better if it was native? Unlikely because they don't have the skillset for it...otherwise it would have been a native app. Its also likely that less apps would even exist because the barrier to entry is higher without electron and similar.

But this is just a meme and I'm taking this way too seriously!

Chrome won't give Web apps access to the file system amongst other things. I'm a firm proponent of web apps - but they can't do everything a desktop app can, and so electron offers an alternative with the trade offs I mentioned.

I'm not shifting the problem if I have actually paid the money to build the 4 lane highway.

dies in 4GB RAM*

Easy solution, get a laptop with 32 GB RAM/s

Seriously though, the problem is either on both or on neither. It's an additional expense on the customer though, like everything else nowadays. I personally ended up getting a super powered laptop/tablet and relying on it for all my computing needs because laptops are good enough for most use cases nowadays and desktops are limited to specific use cases.

Thinking about it though, the reason it's only limited tasks needing more power might be because everything else is electron.

Do you know what this even is? It's not marginal at all. Check the comparisons of Tauri and Electron. And it does not use Chrome. Electron also doesn't use Chrome.

no idea if this is right or not, but lol

Dutch people use it (although I doubt it's an official word), meaning something like "that's what you get" or "oh well".

It works for me.

I did originally have some issues and did some searching that there used to be firefox issues that are now resolved. Mine were fixed by restarting my VPN, but otherwise no problems.

I use a separate FF profile. It has no addons, apart from Vencord and a custom userChrome.css to hide the top tab bar (as full screening it would obstruct swaybar). I then just made an xdg .desktop entry which opens canary.discord.com with firefox using that profile.
Overall it somehow uses less RAM (albeit with another FF instance open, so maybe some resources are shared) than the official App and all other forks (eg. custom electron version) I looked at. Nearly everything works, but:

• File upload for the soundboards is greyed out, switching user agents to chrome results in some obscure error
• Game activity does not work as the browser version cannot access the process list (Though that never even worked acceptable on Linux anyway)
• I did not manage to get xdg-desktop-portal to run properly for screen sharing on Wayland with Nvidia, as - bummer - the latter misses something in their driver. So no screen sharing for discord either
• You sometimes suddenly 'rejoin' a call/VC, which produces a very annoying sound every time. It's either a problem with my connection or the browser version of discord (or both). Disabling join/leave sounds 'fixes' that

Overall all of those problems are a better alternative to the constant flickering that happened with all electron apps on my system if they are not interacted with for a few minutes (eg. by being on another monitor/workspace). That's just distracting as hell and often even breaks functionality. And of course, Nvidia is at fault again. Like for 90% of other problems with my system.
::: spoiler Little rant: Some issues that happen on my Nvidia system (wayland) that are not present on my Dell Laptop w/ Intel HD graphics. I spent hours and days researching those Problems with potential solutions, very few improved some things a bit.

• Electron apps flicker
• Generally, windows with less than 60 FPS will flicker, with transparent stripes letting you see the background/wallpaper
• Firefox sometimes just freezes whole websites, you need to un- and reload the site to continue using it. May be related to hardware accelerated mode tho.
• One update temporarily let games in full screen freeze. Even after killing them. And it still displayed after switching to a tty and back. And it even persisted killing the wayland session. It was just a frozen picture on output 2 forever, while in graphics mode.
• Features such as sharing the screen via xdg-desktop-portal do not work :::