You know exactly that the moment that Discord launches a new version that no longer plays videos, people will whine about it.
> All of this can be done at the platform level. Win32 did this three decades ago.
Yeah, but they're porting to Rust and GPUI and not that.
Chat apps are literally the central example of why Electron is a God-sent. Here's a video from a Rust guy explaining why there are quite a bit of reasons to do it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnaGZHe8wws .
Now i consider that a must have.
Similar for emojis...
It turns out a chat app is about human interaction, not exchanging text, and in human interaction context is a big deal. All these things add context to the chat environment.
Fortunately IRC still works, and you can go enjoy your text only environment if you want!
There is absolutely no reason for Discord—a chat application—to run everything a browser does. Why do I need to play videos in the chat application? Why do individual avatars and even tags have to run custom shaders? It's called scope creep.
> a11y, IME, RTL
All of this can be done at the platform level. Win32 did this three decades ago. Comes with entire language packs.
> so you add a scripting layer, maybe integrate a little Lua VM or something that lets you execute JavaScript
See above: scope creep; features for features' sake.