Behind my two Safari windows is the text editor I use for my technical writing job: BBEdit, a native desktop app. (For coding, though, I prefer to use MacVim, a native desktop app, although I've lately been trying out a beta of the forthcoming Panic Nova, a native desktop app.) I also use Marked, a native desktop app, for Markdown previewing occasionally. Of course, I spend a lot of time in the Terminal, a native desktop app, running command line programs and shell scripts, which are not native desktop apps but are certainly native apps. When I need to run a diff or merge tool, I tend to use Kaleidoscope, a native desktop app. Because I'm in an open office, I sometimes have to resort to headphones, which I primarily use with iTunes, a native desktop app.

Now, as I finish up this response to you in Safari, a native desktop app, remind me what were you saying about native desktop apps again?

Offtopic, but if you’d like an elegant hybrid† Markdown viewing/editing experience, I’d suggest https://typora.io/, another nicely-polished low-memory-consumption native app.

† I don’t know what to call this editing paradigm. It’s somewhere between source-editing and WYSIWYG. Document markup nodes are rendered as their source syntax when your cursor is “inside” them, allowing for plaintext modification of the syntax; but then, when your cursor leaves a node, it switches to rendering as its formatted output instead. You can cursor back into the node to edit it more at any time. It’s pretty unique. It’s the editing style that Slack’s new input box wishes it had.

I use Typora myself, but it's definitely an Electron app (neither native, nor lightweight).

https://support.typora.io/What's-New-0.9.66/

I don’t see Apple going the route of bundling Chromium. Catalyst does allow porting iOS apps to macOS but it’s been not great so far.

I think there will always be a category of people who prefer using native apps for performance, security, or access to OS features. Anecdotally I looked at the apps I have installed and I found out that I don’t have many electron apps on my Mac beside chat apps and VS Code. I suspect non tech-savvy people might have even less, since they do a lot more inside their browsers compared to before.

I’m not sure what you refer to when you say “native desktop apps aren’t coming back”, given that they never left t begin with.

It doesn’t have to be Chromium. It just needs to be a browser that can be linked and launched as an app.

It’s called a “web view” and it already exists in all of the platforms.

WebView is Chromium on Windows now. The holdout is Apple. They are not known to capitulate to industry trends. Maybe this will be the first one they are forced into by popular demand.

Good thing the web is still based on open standards instead of an (advertising) industry trend. We need more viable browser engines, not less.

Current version of Windows already have Chromium in the form of new Edge and Microsoft seems to start pushing progressive web applications. At least they made good integration with system for them.

So, perhaps, soon we will have PWAs instead of bunch of electron apps each carrying its own Chromium.

PWAs can never fully substitute native applications. It's difficult to access hardware and impossible to call operating system functions from a PWA. Applications that do something interesting tend to have a native library behind the frontend that does performance-sensitive work.

Quite the contrary, one of the benefits of PWAs is exactly that when they are distributed via app stores they get access to native APIs without any kind of manual FFI.

That is how they work across ChromeOS, Android and Windows, with Apple being the outlier for obvious reasons.

I didn't know this. If this is true then it's more powerful than Electron, which requires you exchange IPC messages from a separate process. The fact that you have to use the app store is a major disadvantage though.

We had that in Windows 98, it was Active Desktop. It was bloatish and a lot of people disabled it in order to get far more cycles. Heck, IE and Explorer.exe were the same. http://toastytech.com/files/throboff.html

KDE3 did the same with KParts, but it was several times better.

Microsoft was ahead of its time in this. In 2020 we are ready for it. Moore's law has caught up.

It would be less efficient and more wasteful to continue things as normal where every program has its own Electron. People already use Electron type apps. New ones are being made every day. That's not going away. If Microsoft and Apple put this in the OS, it would decrease the user's resource utilization. It's a net win for everyone except maybe chip manufacturers.

As for desktop Linux, GNOME3 already works like Active Desktop did. The whole shell is JS (and the GObject mess down below). I have used a lot of desktop environments. I've been skeptical of the JS eating the world trend. But I have to admit it's smooth. I had bad experiences with KDE (Qt/C++). Not only does it look ugly, it segfaults constantly.

Would it have been better to make a desktop environment in something more, uhh, professional like Go or Java? Of course. But that's not what the crowd decided. There's nothing quite like React for native desktop GUIs. Regardless of your opinion of JS, you have to admit that the React way was a game changer. Since there are no alternatives, the path of least resistance is to simply use React as is for desktop applications, which is exactly what has happened.

If you think this is smooth, you must be new on IT. Xfce already was blazing fast in 2005, even against GNOME 2. Shell is a bloat disaster, and KDE > 3.5.10, a segfaulting fest, but 3.5.10 was rock solid.

I've literally been using desktop Linux since I installed Ubuntu in 2006 in the spinning cubes era. It was never good. Windows (except Vista) always had a snappier interface. Xfce and GNOME2 are fast, I'll give it that, but don't have any animations or aesthetics whatsoever (and yes that does matter--it makes you happy to use your machine). If all I cared about was resource usage, I'd not use a DE at all and only use something like dwm. GNOME3 is polished and works, the best and only free contender to Apple and Windows desktops.

Bloat is something only insiders care about. I care more about adoption of free software than I do about its quality in the academic sense. The way to get adoption is UX and looking nice. If you're trying to convince someone to switch from Windows, what would you show them, Xfce or GNOME3?

Myself, since Debian Woody, when 2.4 was an _optional_ kernel. On snappiness, it depends. On multitasking, KDE3 run circles over XP.

>GNOME3 is polished and works, Not even close. It uses huge loads of RAM while Budgie, while using the same technology, is far snappier. For a current user, I'd suggest Solus with Budgie.

Smooth?! I gave up on it and installed XFCE to get CPU cycles back.

I've only ever used it on expensive hardware so maybe I'm biased.

I have to kill gnome-shell maybe once a week. That's a huge improvement over KDE.

Xfce to me is just too ugly to use. And it messes up my system with all these trash Xfce-only applications and mime associations (seriously what's exo-open and why is it still causing problems 2 years after I uninstalled xfce?).

Everything you've written here presents a nightmarish vision of the computing future. Ethical and privacy considerations play a large role in my decision making process on which software I use. I don't want to use Chromium at all, if possible. I use one Electron app, Slack, on account of requiring it for work.

> Native desktop apps are never coming back

I really hope you're wrong. This would be a terrible outcome for so many reasons. I refuse to use Electron apps on my personal laptop on account of the absolutely noticeable degradation of performance and battery life from using these Electron apps. Using vscode literally halved my battery life.

Gnome already is based on html/js. There is no need for 10 different UI toolkits if one standard can be optimized. The problem is html/js are far from well designed but due to their popularity a lot of time and money has been spent optimizing them.

GNOME makes use of JavaScript, not HTML.

> Native desktop apps are never coming back.

They never went away to start with, it is just a couple of Electron outliers out there.

It's called a browser.