It's worth remembering that electron was first released back in 2016 (formerly atom shell fro 2013) so Internet Explorer was still very much a thing.

Not a great justification, but it made a bit more sense then.

That's like saying it would make sense to make Internet Explorer work on all platforms. It doesn't make sense.

The solution is to use user interface toolkits that are available on each platform. For example, wxWidgets or Qt or appropriate bindings to them if you can't be bothered to write UI code for each platform you're targeting.

> That's like saying it would make sense to make Internet Explorer work on all platforms. It doesn't make sense.

Why not? Microsoft released IE for win16, win32, wince, macos system 7 through 9, macos X, Solaris, HP-UX. If it ran on all those platforms, Microsoft probably could have supported it on any platform that had the capability of running graphical web browsers.

Maybe because wxWidgets is garbage DX and UX wise, and Qt isn’t free and doesn’t allow you to reuse web code? One of the value prop of electron is to reuse your web codebase.

How is wxwidgets garbage DX and UX wise? You can literally read the source code and can build the library in 5 minutes, and the UX is native user interface elements of the given platform.

I don't see how reusing web code is an advantage. Web code is for the web. We are talking about a native platform (Windows 11) which has a mature API platform stretching back decades. Why would you need to make it "web"?