Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview

Re:Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system web... by kijin on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @02:09AM (#19151053)

What developers want is important, but what users want is even more important. If a lightweight app is what users want, that's a good enough reason for at least some companies to consider DeskGap over Electron.

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.

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Re:Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system web... by icelancer on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @02:30AM (#19151145)

> but what users want is even more important

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.

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Re:Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system web... by saagarjha on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @02:58AM (#19151272)

They do, but they misdiagnose it as "my computer is slow" or normalize it because that's all they're used to.

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Re:Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system web... by arvinsim on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @04:52AM (#19151792)

Anecdata but I never heard of that complaint for people I know that use Slack.

Maybe the circle I am in simply has great computers. But who knows.

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Re:Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system web... by dmitriid on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @03:34AM (#19151451)

Users don’t want a “lightweight app”. Users want an app with <a list of features>.

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Re:Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system web... by arvinsim on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @04:53AM (#19151797)

Exactly. If users are held at gunpoint and have to choose between a fast app and a feature rich app, I would bet they will choose the latter.

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Re:Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system web... by userbinator on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @07:43AM (#19152582)

Given what counts as "feature rich" these days (and it seems some developers are constantly removing things that users used to use), I doubt that.

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.

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Re:Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system web... by dmitriid on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @08:36AM (#19152901)

The new Skype is a bad example. It's a perfect example of a designed-by-a-committee-of-managers product that tries and fails to understand the moving part of alternatives such as Slack, Facebook Messenger etc.

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Re:Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system web... by jhgg on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @02:20AM (#19151103)

The cost savings here is in download/package size, and not runtime performance. Chances are latest chromium is faster than the system web-browser.

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Re:Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system web... by kijin on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @02:24AM (#19151117)

Startup time matters. Chances are the system web browser is already cached in memory, whereas every Electron app wants to load its own Chromium runtime.

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