True but anyone that cares about battery life or runs more than one of these apps hates it. So I guess my threshold for "taken by storm" is both "very common" and "users don't hate it".

It is tragic that the only robust solution for cross platform apps eats up so much memory and storage but we're getting to the point where it's not that big a deal.

Java and .Net/Avalonia are right there... Electron is not the only cross platform solution.

While .NET has the cross-platform-vm thing going, is not particularly suited to cross-platform rendering. The web is. And don't get me started on WPF.

That's why I mentioned https://avaloniaui.net/ which does the part. WPF is not bad compared to everything happening in the web frameworks.

I disagree. After working with WPF for a while, I'd prefer almost anything from the frontend world (except React) over WPF. Avalonia is nice though.

Is WPF cross-plaform?

* WPF: Windows-only.

* MAUI: Windows, macOS, Android, iOS.

* Avalonia: Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS, browsers.

I can remember when the rhetoric against Java apps being "slow" was just as strong as it is against Electron now. And they've always been less native-feeling and clunkier than Electron.

Java is a ferrari when compared to Electron.

How so? I know there are theoretical arguments and microbenchmarks that Java might be faster than JavaScript, but I've never seen an actual user-facing GUI app in Java that felt smoother to use than good Electron apps.

Electron shifted the scales to below the old Java while Java improved. It's still not great, but given a choice? Let Electron die.

If you need a Website, use a browser.

They do and and they did. You just don't like that they used the browser in both places.

My computer already has an browser installed, I am not a browser collector.

Might be better if you were, though.

Personally - I collect quite a few for different things. I almost always have at least chrome, firefox, ungoogled-chromium, and - recently - ladybird installed.

Not to mention a couple different chromium versions for various electron apps (slack, discord, etcher, bitwarden, vscode, postman, etc).

Different browsers do different things well, and electron does the "desktop app" niche better than the others right now. In the same way that ladybird does the "not tracked by corporations" part, and firefox does the "still supports manifest v2 extensions" part.

You can complain all you'd like (and I recognize you from other places hating on electron) and it's fine, but it doesn't change incentive structures for the folks deploying these, and as a full time linux user... I am SO fucking happy to have all the BS apps my company requires "just work" on my computers because of electron.

If you don't want to use software developed with Electron... more power to ya. Go make that choice. Leave the rest of us out of it.

From my side... it'd be great if we can make electron suck less (and trust me, I definitely agree that we can), but right now... it's still a pretty huge win.

Only one Electron app is tolerated on my computer, VSCode, and that is because for some stuff that is the only place I get plugins for, and that is about it.

Everything else, if there is a Web app, then I use the browser, no need to ship it alongside every single application out there.

It is like those garbage mobile apps, that are exactly the same website that I can access via the Webbrowser, packaged inside a "native" app.

And I say this as someone that works primarly in distributed systems and Web.

I don't like VSCode, but I wanted to agree that I use Discord and Slack in a browser tab and see very little reason to run them in their own exe.

Pretty much this.

Except that means you're locked in to web APIs.

As it should be.

Yeah I was going to comment the same thing. A very big reason why we are even having this conversation about a browser engine powering native apps is because electron exists. Yes it's sub-optimal but that hasn't impeded its conquest in the slightest.