Electron

“Electron is atrocious, if you asked me. Modern computers are wasting staggering amounts of CPU cycles and memory on inefficient, bloated software stacks.”

“Even a text editor today written in javascript using Electron will take 1GB+ without considering the user could open multiple documents”

“Electron is way bigger than an app needs to be, of course, but those giant apps that you hate, 250MB just for a health tracker? That's not electron being the problem.”

“If they delegate that responsibility to Google via Electron, they can focus on features/bug fixes that move the needle.”

“the eletron desktop is a great "entry" onto desktops ensuring companies only have to update 1 source”

“Just use Electron. Yes, performance blahblah, but thousands of Electron apps work on millions of machines just fine.”

“the quickest way to get a cross-platform installable application that can also be hosted on a web server”

“it's doubtful those apps would have been created in the first place if it wasn't for the speedup of development allowed by ElectronJS”

“Electron is a sane choice and good enough for Figma, Slack, Notion, leading apps in their respective categories.”

“One is that it solves all problems once instead of various times in various levels of quality on various types of systems.”

“The issue with Electron is that it brings a whole jungle and a gorilla holding the single banana that the devs actually need.”

“copy of chromium is bundled with every app that renders webform with text field and button and nothing else”

“I've built apps with Electron in tens of hours that would otherwise take me tens of days or more”

“bundling yhe browser is stability. being exposed to random webviews makes instability inevitible”

“I don't think anybody likes building in Electron; it's just it's that or +200% (or more) eng headcount to build 3 apps”

“a lot of the little things "feel right" because the UI is essentially a Chromium-rendered web page”

“The value of packaging the chrome browser is you don't need to suddenly track down 4+ different webview rendering bugs”

“A software version of that might be making apps with Electron. It doesn't matter how much cpu and ram and disk and general mass of tech stack it takes to make some trivial app.”

“some things that I think would have been much harder to build and maintain in a more constrained setup”

“all without thinking about all the advantages of electron like development speed, cross platform consistency etc.”

“Electron (well, Node is a big sub-culprit) and Javascript in general just make it really easy to create a slow, bloated application.”

“the ability to create truly cross-platform interfaces with the web stack is more important to us than 300 MB of user memory”

“Web technologies like Electron aren’t optimal, but they’re the best way to avoid being stuck to a hardware/software platform.”

“the most major change on RAM usage is electron and the bloated world of text editors and other simple apps written in electron”

“If companies cared about bloat and performance you wouldn't see web apps with dozens of dependencies, cross platform mobile apps and Electron apps.”

“Electron apps tend to use a lot of memory because the framework favors developer productivity and portability over runtime efficiency.”

“Electron apps are incongruent to native OS apps. Electron apps look the same on each platform therefore they are consistent.”

“If they can save effort with Electron and put that effort into things their research says users care about more, everyone wins.”

“Maintaining three separate UI stacks (WinUI, SwiftUI, GTK/Qt) is dramatically more expensive and slower to iterate on than a single web-based UI with shared logic”

“The browsers, on the other hand, use the same language, same rendering model, same layout system, and same accessibility layer everywhere, which is a massive abstraction win.”

“Electron also opens up easier porting to Linux which almost certainly wouldn't happen if companies insist on native only”

“Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app”

“still can't release a desktop chat application without using Electron to bring in several hundred mb of bloat for displaying text”

“Why can't Codex write, or at least translate, your application to native code instead of using a multi-hundred-mb browser wrapper to display text?”

“if Electron enables a company to ship cross-platform apps and iterate faster, who am I to say no?”

“It should be a complete embarrassment to MSFT SWEs that people even think the start menu performance is so bad that it could be implemented in electron.”

“size isn't really a big issue compared to the program simply not working on a large user demographic.”

“it becomes quite a big executable eating a huge amount of ram even for low functionality and often slow”

“There's a lot of nice little things like that in desktop OSes that we completely lose with everyone shifting to using electron”

“Electron has the properties of being here, being stable/maintained, and being good enough until it isn't”