Re:Electron 2.0.0 beta
by greenhouse_gas on Thursday February 22, 2018 @02:46AM
(#16435947)
>Small independent development companies have done applications across multiple platforms by using their native toolkits for decades
Really? How many programs supported Linux before electron?
Usually these companies supported macOS and Windows. I am sure they would have also supported Linux if it had a desktop penetration of more than 1% and if the Linux community was less hostile to closed-source applications.
Don’t take this the wrong way (I was a full time Linux/BSD desktop user from 1994 to 2007 and still have one Linux desktop machine at home), but do we really want to significantly degrade the experience of 99% of the users for 1% of the market?
QML?
Or if you want native applications, what is wrong with Cocoa, Qt, and XAML? A cross-platform toolkit will either be the lowest-common denominator between the platforms (this has been tried before, see e.g. AWT, SWT, wxWidgets) or something that is alien to each platform (Electron). Small independent development companies have done applications across multiple platforms by using their native toolkits for decades. And now suddenly, it is too expensive for GitHub, Slack, and others to develop applications with platform UI toolkits? They are just transferring the cost to the users. We get inconsistent shortcuts, widgets, etc. between programs. No automator support, etc.
There is only a benefit to people who use multiple platforms and want to applications to look the same on every platform. But the vast majority of users just uses one platform, or two if we include tablets/phones (which have different input methods anyway).