Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord just showed why

Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by jFriedensreich on Sunday November 08, 2026 @04:27AM (#50411675)

I am at the opposite extreme. We should ditch electron and use browsers good enough integrated they can run all the apps with native feel and reusing the same engine (not a lacklustre OS webview but a complete one) This solves the memory overhead, solves unpatched or misconfigured chromium in each electron app as well as portability and reusing web dev skills. Also this would allow permissions and security to be managed by a layer that can focus on that and I don't have to worry about what a native app can do. (OS permissions and sandboxing are just not made for vibecoded infinite software and likely never will catch up) All the performance and other arguments are just not true, a well build webapp is often more performant than a native app especially for long scroll lists not even to mention accessibilty, extensions and more. I will never trust discord or Spotify to run something natively on my machine and so should no one else.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by andai on Sunday November 08, 2026 @04:39AM (#50411737)

I just run discord in the browser.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by jlund-molfese on Sunday November 08, 2026 @10:41AM (#50414213)

It’s gotta be to enable screen sharing, so the use can see the title of windows within the app, right? Although the OS should sandbox that away

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by m00dy on Sunday November 08, 2026 @04:49AM (#50411793)

Not sure who's still using electron...Rust + Tauri is pretty much standard these days.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by resonious on Sunday November 08, 2026 @05:27AM (#50411982)

I wish I could agree but Tauri performance is insanely bad on Linux.

I think it'll be fixed soon but it drives me nuts.

Flutter is under appreciated for desktop.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by m00dy on Sunday November 08, 2026 @05:32AM (#50412009)

what metrics drive you nuts ?

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by pas on Sunday November 08, 2026 @06:07AM (#50412227)

Dioxus has many renderers and also cross-platform.

https://github.com/DioxusLabs/dioxus#experimental-native-ren...

Blitz itself is a great experiment in debloating.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by ezst on Sunday November 08, 2026 @08:00AM (#50412895)

How's that different? You are still shipping a web browser and rendering through the inefficiency of the DOM event/rendering model. Sure it helps that the business logic is written in a native language, but modern, JIT-ed JS isn't a sloth either, and I don't think that's what people have gripes with and what causes abnormally large runtimes.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by m00dy on Sunday November 08, 2026 @08:17AM (#50413030)

there's a lot of difference, please just look it up in any AI. Essentially, you do not ship a browser in Tauri.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by arka2147483647 on Sunday November 08, 2026 @06:01AM (#50412186)

The security boundary here is difficult, if you intend to integrate with native workflows.

Also difficult to manage fake websites duplicating the look and feel. Scamming people into giving access or passwords.

A native app which is installed once from a good source is more secure, i feel.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by Trusteando on Sunday November 08, 2026 @06:30AM (#50412347)

Perhaps the native application is just an application that verifies that the web application is not fake, so you can have both things

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by tcfhgj on Sunday November 08, 2026 @06:08AM (#50412237)

> All the performance and other arguments are just not true, a well build webapp is often more performant than a native app especially for long scroll lists not even to mention accessibilty, extensions and more.

A well built web app will never be more performance than a well built native app. It's just inherent due to the JavaScript abstraction.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by broken-kebab on Sunday November 08, 2026 @07:18AM (#50412630)

Never? We already had this discussion about JVM, and we know for a fact that it's possible for JIT to achieve better performance with that damned bytecode compared to natively compiled equivalent.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by redox99 on Sunday November 08, 2026 @07:22AM (#50412655)

It would be extraordinary to see a real world rust program use more memory than its JVM equivalent.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by broken-kebab on Sunday November 08, 2026 @07:44AM (#50412789)

Let's not move the goalposts, the word in question is "performant".

Though even with memory it's not as clear as you assume in the context (which is about browser-based apps). Singular C/Zig/Rust program will surely be more economical than a singular in-browser app due to browser itself having a huge footprint. But what if said user has that browser open all the time anyway as probably most users do? What if there are more than one GUI-rich app, and with browser they share most of the overhead? PLs which allow low-level optimizations offer great opportunities, no arguing. But never say "never" until you know what exact problem yiu have to deal with.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by redox99 on Sunday November 08, 2026 @07:51AM (#50412825)

> Let's not move the goalposts, the word in question is "performant".

Even though the word performance was used by a parent comment, I think they used it as an umbrella term. The article and most of the talk around rust discord is primarily about the memory. And JVM is probably the worst runtime you could pick if you care about memory usage.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by broken-kebab on Sunday November 08, 2026 @10:08AM (#50413941)

Assuming this would make this comment less reasonable though. Optimization for memory usage is distinct from optimization for performance in our craft. And it's pretty basic thing.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by doodlesdev on Sunday November 08, 2026 @11:14AM (#50414487)

[delayed]

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by tcfhgj on Sunday November 08, 2026 @07:59AM (#50412891)

You cannot separate performance from memory usage. Usually less memory usage comes at the cost of performance and vice versa.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by broken-kebab on Sunday November 08, 2026 @10:01AM (#50413894)

To be direct: this is utter nonsence. Memory usage and performance are different targets of optimization, which often at odds with each other.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by tetromino_ on Sunday November 08, 2026 @09:36AM (#50413727)

I have seen it happen once in an LLM rewrite from java to rust. The modern JVM gc is actually pretty good.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by tcfhgj on Sunday November 08, 2026 @07:49AM (#50412810)

Yes never

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by mycall on Sunday November 08, 2026 @09:05AM (#50413482)

So fix the JavaScript abstraction. I've had more success with dart-wasm lately so I'm waiting for someone to finish the standards.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by StilesCrisis on Sunday November 08, 2026 @10:36AM (#50414171)

It's true that JavaScript costs, but the text renderer in Chrome is just wildly optimized and definitely can outperform an OS list view. An article here on HN covered it a while back.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by doodlesdev on Sunday November 08, 2026 @11:07AM (#50414425)

[delayed]

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by SaintRomuald on Sunday November 08, 2026 @11:09AM (#50414440)

Do you have the link to it or remember what it was called?

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by jFriedensreich on Sunday November 08, 2026 @11:04AM (#50414404)

The question is at what cost and at that level of both being optimal does it even matter to the user or is indistinguishable. There will always be 1% native apps that make sense, i'm talking about 99% of applications.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by hobo123 on Sunday November 08, 2026 @06:24AM (#50412322)

In a way yes, but things like keyboard shortcut, file pickers and similar are major convenience issues and not as easy if the only thing that runs on the metal is a server process, and the UI is limited to the browser. A webview UI like Tauri might solve that (I'm not familiar with it, so I can't say if it does).

I think that's also the main reason software like VS Code is electron based and not browser based.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by eptcyka on Sunday November 08, 2026 @06:29AM (#50412342)

> well build webapp is often more performant than a native app especially for long scroll lists

A well built anything is better than most software. I would argue that a well built rust app will probably a higher quality piece of software than typescript slop produced by Microsoft.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by prmph on Sunday November 08, 2026 @07:09AM (#50412566)

[delayed]

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by skybrian on Sunday November 08, 2026 @10:34AM (#50414138)

[delayed]

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by mulhoon on Sunday November 08, 2026 @07:50AM (#50412820)

I agree with this. And even further, I think we wasted a decade or so, forcing web and native apart - especially on mobile. Partly due to Apple building a native moat when we could have put resources into building a more performant and powerful internet.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by neya on Sunday November 08, 2026 @08:30AM (#50413173)

You can optimize all you want, but if your foundation is a pack of cards, you're not going very far. JavaScript is not a solid foundation to build anything on. It's a language that should have been extinct long ago along with internet explorer. But, people kept trying to save it - adding abstraction on top of abstraction, even languages on top of it (coffeescript, typescript) just to get it to work at the baseline of a decent language. It's the only language that is forced upon us. If browsers gave us options to use other languages, it would and should've been long been dead.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by gloosx on Sunday November 08, 2026 @08:53AM (#50413400)

If javascript is not a solid foundation to build anything on, then how come everything is built on top of it? It's the language powering the whole web, and people went really really far with it. Besides that, almost every major programming language can now run in the browser via webassemly, which solves problems in the areas where javascript is lacking raw performace.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by Rumple22Stilk on Sunday November 08, 2026 @09:20AM (#50413596)

Because you have no choice?

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by pdimitar on Sunday November 08, 2026 @09:35AM (#50413713)

Your parent comment already answered that.

You're mistaking "JS is forced on people and they have no choice but to make it work" with "it's everywhere so it must be good".

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by neya on Sunday November 08, 2026 @09:48AM (#50413813)

> how come everything is built on top of it

Can you share something else they could've built everything else on top of, instead? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Do you really think a normal junior dev is going to be/should be writing web assembly code to build a basic portfolio website?

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by katbyte on Sunday November 08, 2026 @09:52AM (#50413839)

> how come everything is built on top of it

Everything is not built on top of it.

> It's the language powering the whole web

It’s also not powering the whole web, just a significant part of the client frontend inside browsers.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by tw04 on Sunday November 08, 2026 @09:46AM (#50413791)

What? No, absolutely not. Did you not learn your lesson when google decided to actively try to kill ad blocking? Why on EARTH would I want all of my desktop apps at the mercy of google and chromium?

You can tell me until you're blue in the face that you also think these apps should be cross-browser but we all know that will never happen.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by jFriedensreich on Sunday November 08, 2026 @11:07AM (#50414431)

This is whataboutism. There is still firefox as possible second engine impl and you are arguing its better to not have a layer at all than accepting the possibility google might take it away. Plus most people are on macs or windows where there are at least as bad actors playing against them.

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