I just made this as a reply in another thread where the user essentially believed you couldn't have a nice GUI (his example was VS Code) with a native toolkit that's also easy to develop in:
https://i.imgur.com/RPr6VMS.png
https://gitlab.com/mixedCase/poc-qml-vscode
We've had the tools for a long time in desktop, let's not pretend we don't.
In meantime, i will just bookmark your comment :)
Install QtCreator, grab the docs and play around in a new project. You can drag and drop components around in design mode and you'll be able to figure out how QML works from there. It's really intuitive.
Also the point of QtQuick as an alternative to Electron is not to look native beyond the menus and dialogs.
And you probably associate Qt with Qt widgets, not QtQuick. Qt widgets actually tries to resemble and behave like native widgets, and it will let you get to that point if you actually care about that.
Most people making cross plat applications don't, which is why popular Qt widgets applications like VirtualBox and VLC don't look native, and QtQuick applications like Telegram for Desktop just ignore the desktop's HIGs completely.
What? Let's not rewrite history. I has been easy and cheap to create desktop UIs for decades, literally. I was using Borland Delphi 1.0 as a 13 year old and could have a basic Windows UI app up and running in ten minutes.
There have been many great cross-platform and platform-specific toolkits that are easy to use. E.g. you can teach someone with some Python knowledge how to make basic Qt desktop applications in one hour or so. It's literally as simple as dragging some widgets to a window and writing some lines of wrapper code.
I recommend anyone who thinks that developing applications using web UIs is easier/cheaper to look at some Delphi 1.0 videos. E.g.:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_3K_0vjUhk
This was how we developed desktop applications 22 years ago on machines with 4 or 8 MB RAM. And it is still a whole lot easier and more efficient than a web app.
Additionally, Microsoft has their own framework similar to what QML offers: WPF. The problem with it is that it doesn't have cross platform support, something they wanted to have for VSCode.
It's all exhorbitantly easy to use. Cost is not the issue, specially since they already have a lot of really talented people working on VS Code.
I have used quite a few UI toolkits since those days and am yet to agree with the opinion that the Frankenstein mixture of HTML, CSS and JavaScript is a better UI toolkit.
The thing about efficient language wasn't 100% targeted at web technologies alone, but at the general waste of computing resources for something as trivial as a mail client. Just because we have SSDs, gigabytes of RAM and CPUs that do a whole lot of cycles doesn't mean wasting a good portion of it is a good idea.
I was saying that's the right trade-off to choose in a lot of common use cases. Because most UI toolkits are pretty limiting, and the web toolkit can be amazingly powerful and productive. Of course, if you follow the latest fads in the awful js community they are a nightmare, but lets not pretend that's the only way to use the platform when it makes sense to pay the efficiency cost.
no different to having your javascript decryption routines done by a website
Nonetheless you're absolutely correct; i would prefer firefox to chrome.