In the article, the claim is made: if many popular software products like Slack, VSCode, and Docker Desktop all use Electron, then it must be good.
In response, I would say: while Electron makes it easy for the software developer to build and distribute software, especially on multiple platform, as an end user it is NEVER the best experience.
That's why there are people spending significant effort to develop better solutions than Electron. For instance, the Tauri project ( https://tauri.app/ ) is a lightweight alternative to Electron.
The article defends the minimum application bundle size of 100MB-300MB is as no issue, because streaming 4K video takes much more bandwidth than such a software download. But the bigger issue than disk space or download bandwidth is the RAM usage and overall low performance of Electron projects. Even with a 16 GB or 32 GB RAM system, when you're running many apps and doing serious multitasking, the gigabytes quickly get used up and then things slow down.
For example, if you have used VSCode, try using the Zed editor (https://zed.dev/). You will be blown away by its incredible speed. Launches in the blink of an eye, and it responds to every input with zero latency. We have forgotten that software can actually be fast.
> In the article, the claim is made: if many popular software products like Slack, VSCode, and Docker Desktop all use Electron, then it must be good.
I don't know anyone who thinks these are good applications, with the (imo incorrect) exception of VSCode.
I can't believe that any significant number of people involved in these UX designs have even the slightest clue what users want or value. We're just aping what the big guys are doing because they're big and refusing to examine this decision at all.
Maybe what's best for users is not the most flashy, bloated application possible. Maybe users want interfaces that make it quick and easy to accomplish a task without being manipulated into spending as much time as possible in the app for.... reasons?
My extremely cold take is that software should be useful first and pretty second. If your artistic vision gets in between the user and their task, then you have failed utterly as a designer.
>In response, I would say: while Electron makes it easy for the software developer to build and distribute software, especially on multiple platform, as an end user it is NEVER the best experience.
People on HN have this idealistic view of software that it should always make the best use of the native platform. In reality, the vast majority of users don't care that much.
Electron does 3 things very well:
1. Availability. If not for Electron, would this desktop app have been made?
2. Low cost. Electron apps are cheaper to make because they're cross platform which lowers the dev resources.
3. Uniform feature set no matter where you use it. Web, macOS, PC, Linux. All the same experience. No missing features.
So while Electron uses more memory and it lags sometimes, the benefits outweigh the cost for a category of apps such as chat apps.
It doesn't have to be the best experience. It just has to be better than the alternative, which is in many cases no app (or in the case for Slack, the web app)
While it’s just one small section of the article, I notice there is the sort of industry-standard erasure of the entire concept of good vs bad UI or engineering, in the “Web apps are bad” section.
A “good” app, in this article, is one that is “successful, versatile, [or] capable.” Any McDonald’s kiosk is an example of a “good” app, because it’s so “successful.” If you think a much-used app has UI that isn’t “good” and would be improved by using native technologies, well, first of all, “the market” is the arbiter of what’s good, not you, and second of all, even if you are right, your criticism lacks empathy for the “requirements and constraints” developers face, you are ignorant about the fact that things have tradeoffs, or you are some perfectionist who thinks everything needs to be a work of art.
Software engineers are so preemptively defensive about quality.
The market decides what is successful. "Good" does not factor into the equation at all.
This is why you cannot buy a car or a TV that doesn't spy on you. These things are objectively bad and everyone agrees. Nobody outside of adtech thinks spyware TVs are a good thing, and yet the magical market fairy has removed all non-spying options.
Does this mean that a TV spying on you at all hours and beaming your private conversations to an adtech firm in real time is a good thing? Is your car reporting realtime statistics on your driving habits and destinations to your insurance good for you? The market sure seems to think so.
"The market" is not a fairy godmother with your best interests at heart. As far as the market is concerned, you only exist as a source of dollars. Whether or not you exist or will have dollars in the future is irrelevant. The market wants your dollars now and literally nothing else matters.
In response, I would say: while Electron makes it easy for the software developer to build and distribute software, especially on multiple platform, as an end user it is NEVER the best experience.
That's why there are people spending significant effort to develop better solutions than Electron. For instance, the Tauri project ( https://tauri.app/ ) is a lightweight alternative to Electron.
The article defends the minimum application bundle size of 100MB-300MB is as no issue, because streaming 4K video takes much more bandwidth than such a software download. But the bigger issue than disk space or download bandwidth is the RAM usage and overall low performance of Electron projects. Even with a 16 GB or 32 GB RAM system, when you're running many apps and doing serious multitasking, the gigabytes quickly get used up and then things slow down.
For example, if you have used VSCode, try using the Zed editor (https://zed.dev/). You will be blown away by its incredible speed. Launches in the blink of an eye, and it responds to every input with zero latency. We have forgotten that software can actually be fast.
Jonathan Blow, "Will Software Stop Getting Slower?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ka549NNdDk