I'm both sad and confused about why there are so many negative comments about Electron, when I happily use Electron apps every day of my life and have no complaints at all about them. In fact, I'd like to start building Electron apps of my own, it actually looks like a ton of fun!

What is the experience I'm missing?

I think any technology where you can get something done quickly, and blurs the line between production and prototyping, gets a bad reputation because a lot of people misuse it. Essentially, I think you need to be able to have a strong engineering culture that takes the time to actually optimize things as the scale/scope changes.

As a not quite accurate example, think JS vs C++, there's no way you can hammer a bunch of C++ to get something working without not shooting yourself in the foot multiple times, so you have, to a certain extent, to properly develop it from the start. Whereas with JS, you can probably get something working quickly and prove your point. And it's very easy for this shitty JS solution to end up in production because it just works.

You can write very good JS code if you have the engineering culture for understanding it's importance, while with C++ it will be somewhat good from the start because it has to be. I think here is the same thing, for example what has been mentioned here, VSCode vs Slack.

It is certainly possible to make high quality, well behaved software with Electron (VS Code is great), but it takes a hell of a lot of work, and seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

Look at Teams for example. The Electron desktop app is a slow, buggy, resource sucking mess. A video call with one person reduces my laptop battery from 8 hours to 2, fans going at full tilt the entire time. It uses its own notification system that doesn't (or at least didn't) respect the system notification settings. Lots of small things you innately expect to work, like being able to right click a message to edit it, simply do nothing.

Of course, take this with a grain of salt, because I'm generally of the opinion that the DOM is a mediocre target for applications, and that we all put up with it because it's attached to the world's greatest distribution mechanism. So to me, the fact that we'd want to bring all that awkwardness to the desktop and divorce it of its killer feature seems insane.

I love comments like this. Ideas that I've had for a long time articulated in a way I never could.

Maybe they use computers from 10+ years ago, otherwise the complaint is weird.

Compare an electron app to a well written desktop app There is a difference in responsiveness. And installing a new browser instance for every app is a waste of disk space.

If you don't want Electron apps, don't use them. It's not like they would exist without Electron.

The people who build Electron apps are, for the most part, people who wouldn't build an app otherwise.

> The people who build Electron apps are, for the most part, people who wouldn't build an app otherwise.

Would that be so terrible? I’m completely fine with having less software, if that means having better software.

> If you don't want Electron apps, don't use them. It's not like they would exist without Electron.

I don’t have a choice. I’m forced to use Teams for work. I need to restart my MacBook after every videocall.

> I’m completely fine with having less software, if that means having better software.

But it doesn't work like that. Why would you suddenly have "better" software?

The need for software doesn't go away, but bad programmers cannot fill it anymore. So the software is made by competent programmers instead.

I wouldn't say bad programmers, there's literally nobody offering me a job in rust/crystal/swift but electron and JS SPA jobs are countless.

There are good programmers working with Electron, they're just in the minority.

I need to use zoom now but would rather not install it. I put it on an old tablet and every one is happy.

Say what you want about Zoom, but performance-wise their app is absolutely amazing compared to Teams. I’m sure that the fact they choose to develop native apps instead of Electron crap has a lot to do with their success.

That would have been fine if one had a choice. If the rest of the team uses slack then well, you are also using slack.

And thus people start to actually believe that a chat-application must be this bloated. And because of that any competition that actually is developed is also using electron...

And those who actually do care either goes insane or finds another hobby, at least feels that way sometimes.

> The people who build Electron apps are, for the most part, people who wouldn't build an app otherwise.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Remember to stop using VSCode, since it's based on Electron

I did, moved to Nova.

Enjoy your amazing but unsupported piece of software.

There was a little thing called Espresso 2, years ago. It was amazing.

The beautiful X-Ray view for CSS? Incompatible with SCSS.

It didn’t take long to reach the conclusion that my job changed enough that I could no longer use what made Espresso 2 great.

I guess e.g. MS Teams would exist, but in general I agree with you

No one who uses Slack chose to use Slack.

So ignore they exist & live the future you want. Any resurgence in Desktop Apps was because of Electron, many of which would not have been created otherwise.

Can confirm. Without electron my app would stay web app forever, without e.g. offline capabilities ...

Well, there is some chance you can just run iOS/iPadOS forms of the apps (e.g, Slack) rather than Electron apps on M1. 's not as bleak.

I'm glad that you and your cohort are not more than a very tiny minority.