Maybe having multiple engines is good (although maybe the benefits are overstated since nowadays most engines align with the spec instead of implementing non-standard extensions like ActiveX), but it's not good for people for who want to quickly, and with low effort, develop desktop applications.
The point of the parent comment was that developers chose Electron over other frameworks for reasons such as speed of development, and DeskGap does not align with those reasons.
I'm sick of sluggish "native" apps on my i7 PC with fast SSDs and 32GB of RAM. I don't even want to imagine how those apps perform on low-end devices.
Only developers and very tech-savvy people bitch about Slack. Your average person working in Sales, HR, or operations cares not for the memory footprint of Slack.
It's also not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. Yeah, it's slower than mIRC, fair enough. But IRC is dead to almost everyone and Slack took over, so it is what it is.
Maybe the circle I am in simply has great computers. But who knows.
Software used to be both fast and "feature rich" (relatively speaking), designed so users could "grow" and learn increasingly more of it. Now almost everything seems to have idiotically dumbed-down "flat" UIs that look simpler yet still manage to consume more resources than before.
The new Skype is a great example. Compare to something like this: https://www.microsip.org/ Yes, I know they're different protocols, but the point is that IM and audio/video call functionality doesn't need to take as much resources as Skype does.
The real reason MS and IE were not so good is because they were a closed source monopoly! And moreover the copyright was enforced by the government.
Now even M$ switched over to WebKit / Blink.
Collaboration beats competition in the end.
Wikipedia beat Britannica quite handily. And it beat Encarta, too.
Open source beat closed source over time.
The Web beat AOL and Compuserve.
Science beat secret cults and alchemy.
Today Pharma is using patents and competition. People are prevented from building on each other’s work in microbiology but not in other sciences. Isn’t that wild?
I would rather have lots of people adding to one snowball platform, than having competing platforms. AS LONG AS that platform is open source and anyone can use it for any purpose. If your commits don’t make it into the core, just market them until they get popular enough. Compatibility is the goal, though.
It has nothing to do with the point that trying to make your code work in multiple browsers/rendering engines is painful.
Wanting a project to work with multiple rendering engines just because is an idealogical decision.
Yes, lots of projects want multiple, competitive rendering engines.
It used to be that Windows was the only viable target OS for commercial software. Firefox and Safari gave IE competition and gave developers who wanted to target Mac and Linux a way to get a foot in the door. That kicked off the whole generation of web apps we’ve just lived through. If developers give up on Gecko and WebKit, then they allow a monopoly again. And since Electron is made by GitHub and is now owned by Microsoft, Microsoft will again have the monopoly (with the caveat that Google has primary influence over Blink).
Render engine competition keeps web standards relevant, which keeps the web open. Take away competition & we’ll be back in a world where people build to IE6 for a decade instead of targeting standard HTML/CSS/JS.