Re:Signal Desktop beta now publicly available
by joshka on Friday April 08, 2016 @06:19AM
(#11453689)
Cool, that sounds like some legit concerns to me. It's a shame that we can't install a shared lib for electron, but then perhaps thats the browser...
Re:Signal Desktop beta now publicly available
by fulafel on Friday April 08, 2016 @06:45AM
(#11453762)
A lot of runtimes are really big these days. Qt, Python, Mono are all big. Of course Java is bigger than most and comes with adware to boot.
Java comes with adware on the platform with the worst java installer. It's slow to install and forces you to actively deselect adware, but there's a Windows tool that can do that for you and there are package managers and app setup bundles. Installing Java on Linux and FreeBSD is very simple and fast.
Qt these days needs at minimum 30MB for a simple window and that's a huge overhead for basically a hello-qt app.
But Qt isn't as bloated as carrying around another browser.
1. Massive download for a simple app. 37M is a lot of data. 2. Massive download for every simple app. It would go a long way if every electron app didn't have pull in a full 37M, and could share a set of common libraries. n*37M is a lot of data, and this is one strong reason I like this Signal Desktop release. 3. Battery unfriendliness. Even when idle, every Electron app does a lot under the hood that isn't even related to the app itself. This is the cruft of having a full web browser and an advanced JS VM, but it is a cruft regardless, and it is very disheartening when reduces a ten hour battery life to six hours.