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Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

It's appropriate to call Chrome an OS-like platform, and it's quite convenient to ship apps with, but it's not "Flash for the desktop". As someone who is opposed to bloat but sometimes appreciates convenience, I think Electron is getting a bad rap here for something that was screwed up by the JS app developers.

Go to Electron's website and download the demo (called API Demos). It's 3 processes and consumes 0.0 CPU on idle. Is it super efficient space-wise for what it does? Certainly not. And RAM usage is a valid concern. But churning CPU cycles on idle is not Electron's / Chrome's fault. I also suspect that if an app is behaving grossly on Electron, it's probably a bad actor within a generic browser environment, too.

My recommendation would be to not ship simple web apps wrapped in this huge machine without a good reason. But there are good reasons to use Electron or NW. It's just a poor choice when all you need is a thin wrapper around your website.

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Blog author here. Thats a fair criticism. I wanted to pick on Spotify and Atom more in my blog post, but both Spotify and Atom have cleaned up their act. I couldn't get either one to reproducibly use lots of CPU. Props to everyone involved in fixing that.

But I'd also argue that Flash could always be written to be efficient too. The problem with flash was never the little games people made. The problem was that one tab with a stupid punch-the-monkey banner add playing somewhere that would sit on 20% cpu even when the tab was in the background. I think Electron is similar, except in the desktop space. Well written apps seem to be able to keep CPU load down (although they still have a huge download and a huge RAM footprint). But there's been a running trend of noticing some dumb software running somewhere on my machine eating all my CPU. And in the last year or two its been an electron app, every time. Just like flash before it.

> ... I couldn't get either one [Spotify or Atom] to reproducibly use lots of CPU. Props to everyone involved in fixing that.

It seems deceiving to conceal that information when your call to action is to ditch Electron for the sake of performance.

The original blog post is from Oct 2016... can't reproduce the bug now. That's ok; not deceiving.

It's not at all clear from their statement that they tried to reproduce that now, and not that they attempted that in 2016 and didn't manage to.

>I wanted to pick on Spotify and Atom more in my blog post, but both Spotify and Atom have cleaned up their act. I couldn't get either one to reproducibly use lots of CPU. Props to everyone involved in fixing that.

Gotta agree with the other response here. If you have shown that what would seem to be much larger and more CPU intensive applications have been able to reliably perform well, why suggest moving away from electron instead of suggesting that users learn how to use it correctly, or perhaps suggesting that electron better educate users on how to use it correctly?

> I wanted to pick on Spotify and Atom more in my blog post, but both Spotify and Atom have cleaned up their act

Can you please share how you came to the conclusion that Spotify is made with Electron? (hint: it's not)

It uses WebViews heavily.

I'm not saying it doesn't, it's built on Chromium Embedded Framework.

The author is claiming it's built on Electron, which is false.

Yep sorry about that - I've corrected the mistake in the blog post.

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