I use Slack and other Electron based applications because my job requires it, imposed by our IT or customers, not because I freely have chosen to use them or have the liberty to look for alternatives.

Other than VSCode for Rust and TypeScript, my own personal computer is as much Electron free as possible.

So don't mistake market share for freedom of choice.

VSCode is a great example. We’ve already established that the average joe out there doesn’t care about whether an app is implemented in electron or not. But VSCode’s success at the expense of every other editor out there indicates that even developers don’t care that much.

The important thing is features - which VSCode has, and the speed at which those features are developed and deployed on all platforms - where VSCode is nearly peerless.

If developers cared about performance and resource consumption above all else, no one would be using VSCode right now (you included). They’d be using vim, emacs or perhaps Sublime. But that isn’t the case.

So why does HN keep flogging the “electron is bad” meme?

The day Microsoft releases Rust support for Visual Studio, VSCode gets kicked out of my PC.

Also, I wonder how much the Electron love overlapps with VSCode, after all many of those developers were pushing for Atom before VSCode was born.

Not much, at least here. I was a Sublime Text user for years. I tried Atom but it was an ugly, janky mess. I switched to VScode quickly after its release because the features it provided over Sublime Text were worth it, and the performance was good enough, even though not on par with ST.

And me thinking that it was probably about those $80.

I expect things to go the other way. Visual Studio will eventually be phased out for VSCode or something like it.

I think Microsoft chose Chromium for Edge mostly because they have big plans for Electron.

Some do, while I can't speak for the emacs community the (n)vim community is very active and engaged. There are modern vim plugins for nearly everything. The developers using VSCode tend to be developing on overpowered workstations where the difference is less noticeable. It doesn't mean it isn't wasteful. At some point we'll hit some upper bounds as an industry and have to rethink how we develop software, the trend back towards statically typed, compiled languages like Rust, Swift, Go are already leading us in that direction.

Edit: a word missing

> the trend back towards statically typed, compiled languages like Rust, Swift, Go are already leading us in that direction.

Indeed, even Java and .NET are improving their AOT stories, while available since the early days, weren't as widely deployed as they could have been.

Hopefully soon Java will have a friction-less path to compiling to native. As of now, its quite difficult for anything that isn't trivial.

It has been trivial since 2000, but you had to buy a commercial JDK to get it.

It is not trivial. Have you tried compiling any large app with graal? Anything with Weld or hibernate or H2 embedded? It has a lot of friction and isn't as easy as just running mvn package.

Because some things being good does not mean we shouldn't criticize the bad ones.

No, criticise whatever you want.

I'm just saying users don't care. They'll still use software that has the features they're looking for, on the platforms they use, as long as performance is acceptable.

I'm pushing back against the idea that performance nuts on HN who won't install a single electron app are somehow representative of the population at large.

I use Visual Studio (not Code) for C#, Python and Node now.

Let's not forget that MS Teams has more paying users than Slack....

How many people know that Slack is battery draining monstrosity?

The only people that pay for Slack are companies. The definition of Enterprise Software is where the user is not the customer.

MS Teams is an Electron app too. This very post is about React Native for Windows and Mac, which are being developed by MS because they're used for the front-ends of much of the rest of Office 365. Microsoft clearly thinks that it's worth rewriting large parts of their crown jewels using cross-platform frameworks.

Hmm this one is tough Office 365 has more paying users on teams. I doubt anyone is paying for teams, also they are not direct competitors. We use both, likely to get phones with teams in the future as well.

Whether it is fair or not that Teams comes with Office is irrelevant. This is Slack's competition. They have to convince companies that it is worth paying extra for their product.

In the famous words of Jobs about Dropbox -- chat isn't a product, it's a feature.

What I am saying is, we dont pay more or less for teams, its a SfB replacement.

I remember when Spotify 'upgraded' from a native to a js application on MacOS. It bricked my wife's computer. She never installed Spotify again. This is someone who doesn't usually care about software. She did care about that annoyance.

If Spotify bricked her computer, it was an issue with computer, not Spotify. It just so happened that you installed Spotify before the computer was bricked. If Spotify did that, you’d have heard stories of other Macs just completely dying out there if this was an actual issue.

It works fine for hundreds of millions of other users

Indeed. I had this argument with some of our non-tech staff countless of times. They absolutely prefer Slack, Basecamp & Co. as separate app. Doesn't matter if it's just an electron container - to them a browser tab/window is a subpar experience compared to an icon in the dock and its own exclusive window. Hardware requirements and the fact that each app needlessly runs itws own browser obviously aren't a concern to them.