I actually can't run it locally (absurd tech policies), and I am so glad to never run it at all ever. Just easier to load it into an isolated browser tab when I need it, Zoom is so superior it's not even funny...
* Looking at an arbitrary article, "Why does Slack desktop app use Electron?" [1], the answer seems mostly aesthetics, "faster performance [citation needed] and the frameless look".
[1] https://brainhub.eu/library/electron-app-examples#:~:text=Wh...
It’s a shame, because cross platform app building, distribution and updates is a shitshow, even with electron, putting extra labor on the developers.
That said, some apps should really be web apps, but are still bundled as desktop apps purely for frameless “premium” experience. It would be great if there was better browser support for allowing users to “install” web apps, but right now it’s pretty bad.
In the Electron case, it’s wasteful to some degree. Especially if the app is not doing much with files/storage etc. For VSCode it makes sense to not run in the browser but for Slack, not so much.
But generally I feel like there’s too much overlap between OS, browsers, IDEs and language runtimes (JVM, V8/Node etc.). It gets worse if you add containers and VMs.
I wonder how many garbage collectors, file abstractions, JITs, databases, schedulers, GUI engines, indexers and so on are running on my machine. How many flavors and versions of essentially the same libraries are used.
There is no unified vision, of what an OS/runtime/IDE/browser should be. There’s not even a common understanding!
I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? Motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then one day …