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A comment on Is AI causing a repeat of Front end's Lost Decade?. Parent comment

Re:Is AI causing a repeat of Front end's Lost Decade? by coldtea on Friday May 29, 2026 @05:36PM (#48329636)
>Electron is an artifact of the richest companies in the world prioritizing their platform monopolies and trying to increase their stranglehold on businesses by forcing them to write platform specific code, which is hysterically expensive to build and maintain. When I'm confronted with writing for web then reimplementing for mac and win... the answer is electron.

And yet we could build native apps a plenty in the 90s and 2000s, with 1/100 the resources (tutorials, third party libs, native GUI frameworks, IDEs, etc) available, and 1/10th the target user base.

It's not about "platform specific code, being hysterically expensive to build and maintain". It was more expensive in the 1990s and 00s too, but people built it and maintained it just fine.

It's companies chosing convenience.

Especially since it's not poor programmers and small software shops going for Electron. It's the biggest multi-billion to trillion dollar companies.

Facebook uses this crap, Slack uses this crap, Adobe and Google use similar web-based UI crap (in what used to be native apps), and so on.

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Re:Is AI causing a repeat of Front end's Lost Decade? by jerhewet on Friday May 29, 2026 @07:43PM (#48330802)
Microsoft Teams. The poster child for web-based UI crap.
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Re:Is AI causing a repeat of Front end's Lost Decade? by x0x0 on Friday May 29, 2026 @10:24PM (#48331803)
> native apps a plenty in the 90s and 2000s

And 1/100th the feature footprint.

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Re:Is AI causing a repeat of Front end's Lost Decade? by coldtea on Saturday May 30, 2026 @07:57AM (#48335252)
What? They had more features that we gave up, including native platform integration.
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Re:Is AI causing a repeat of Front end's Lost Decade? by cyberrock on Friday May 29, 2026 @11:24PM (#48332225)
Building is not the same as maintaining and updating. As long as Apple wants to take a week to review every change and occasionally rejecting client versions (insert similar complaints about Microsoft, Google, Linux here), there will still be a case for these technologies.
[ Parent | on HN ]