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Re:Electron is flash for the desktop (2016) by catshirt on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @11:50AM (#14089167)
seriously. and skype is a grand example of how shitty a native client can be.

tired of this argument. if you put in the proper effort, your users won't care or notice.

Re:Electron is flash for the desktop (2016) by drdaeman on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @12:12PM (#14089470)
Is Skype native?

Except for the very old 4.x Linux version - which is native Qt - and comparably old Windows ones, I thought, all of the recent versions are webbrowser wrappers (one sort or another) with some occasional native widgets around that.

Re:Electron is flash for the desktop (2016) by drdaeman on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @02:32PM (#14091013)
(Can't edit the post above) But, of course, Skype issues aren't because of their UI nativeness. Their UI layer is... well, tolerable. Heck, I'd be happy if all I'd have to complain about Skype would be a crappy UI.

But I don't think UI implementation has to do anything about why we love it so much. I mean, missing calls and messages every other week, random desync between clients and all the usual rituals that every other group call starts from (you can hear them accompanied with chants "can everyone hear me?", "$name are you here?", "tell me if you see my screen" and "let me drop the call and restart").

Re:Electron is flash for the desktop (2016) by catshirt on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @07:01PM (#14093283)
i think i was still overreacting to prove a point. everything you're saying is right.

my point is, even if i concede native is "better" or whatever, the difference should be negligible for most apps for all users (let alone "most" users).

Re:Electron is flash for the desktop (2016) by matthewmacleod on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @12:10PM (#14089457)
You are of course correct. It's possible to make awful native applications, and good non-native applications.

The sliders mean that you will trade performance off against ease-of-development. It will be easier to ship a basic Electron/web-stack app than a native one for multiple platforms. However, it will be harder to do this is in a high-performance and well-integrated way.

I went through all this with Cordova back in the day when trying to build cross-platform mobile apps. I was able to ship apps quickly, but at the expense of quality – it's okay to do this so long as you are aware of the trade-off.

Re:Electron is flash for the desktop (2016) by catshirt on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @12:20PM (#14089585)
yep definitely. and there is definitely a cost and effort required to make Electron feel as good as native. depending on your feature requirements, this can get really hairy.

i'm just exhausted by the "web apps feel so much worse than native!1" argument which is an over simplification and not a rule.

Re:Electron is flash for the desktop (2016) by Johnny_Brahms on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @01:47PM (#14090564)
Skype for Linux is a web app. It is a lot worse than the old Qt client.

Are the other platforms native? I thought they switched to webrtc in 2015 to be able to just use a simple web window wrapper for all platforms, just not Linux.

Re:Electron is flash for the desktop (2016) by easuter on Thursday April 13, 2017 @03:45PM (#14110315)
The newer skype versions on Windows are web-based.