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Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

It's normally in an attempt to "build once deploy everywhere" using tools first built as web technologies. The same selling point as the JVM for Java. In some ways Electron serves as a bit of a JVM for web, but then, that is also the utility of a browser. You can see it as an artifact of the web technology coming first and trying to port it backward to other devices. I wish we had ported some of the awesome GUI libraries from native languages forward to the web instead, perhaps when Web Assembly is ubiquitous we can finally have some coherence in tooling.

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What is it about native ui technology that you think is better than web tech? In my experience, the singular advantage of native tech is performance. Am I missing something?

Lots of times the people on HN advocating for native ui toolkits just have fond memories of a form builder on Windows 95 when you didn't have to worry about all these different screen sizes and stuff.

And yet not a single valid reason is given. "Because it's the old way of doing things" is completely inadequate as a technical reason to not use a technology.

Having to worry about all these different screen sizes, devices, browsers and OS is a completely valid reason for not using a Windows 95 era form builder anymore.

As pointed out in other responses, pretty much every native kit nowadays offers sizing. Hell, it was one of the selling points for GTK+ back in 1998.

What desktop apps are people using today that still have static sizes (outside of dialog/info boxes)?

No one is talking about using form builders instead of react. They are talking about using modern, competent application frameworks that power some of the most powerful applications in use today. Almost everything in the web stack is an adaptation of a native technology.

The basic metaphors are still the same because we're still using mouses on the desktop. With mobile devices these metaphors break down fairly quickly, though.

HTML-based applications however also introduced a number of new metaphors and patterns such as the page paradigm that, while originally reminiscent of printed pages, is different from anything both in the physical world and within native desktop applications.

Typography and information hierarchy are other aspects that usually can't be implemented as easily or as flexibly with native UI kits as with HTML-based approaches.

Nowadays you can design responsive UIs with Interface Builder or the Android Studio equivalent with joy.

Can you qualify this "lots of times" claim?

Native UI gives you things like decent accessibility support and conformance to platform conventions for free, as well as automatic support for new system features like the dark mode being added in macOS Mojave.

Other than that, it’s just one less thing you have to bundle when distributing your app — especially if you opt to use the local JS engine instead of V8. A JS desktop app written with something like Vue Native and system JS will be a great deal more lightweight than its electron equivalent.

I would say taking 1/10th or 1/100th of resource is a pretty damn big advantage even if that's just one advantage. Modern browsers are probably the most inefficient mainstream computer technology ever regardless of how useful it might have been.

Ironically, web browsers themselves are extremely optimized. They are one of the most efficient pieces of software out there. It takes actual work to screw all that up and turn it into the molasses that is modern web. Careers are built out of that work.

It's not constantly churning and it has matured over many years. Those are genuine benefits.

I am not a fuddy duddy holding onto old memories, I am a long term web developer watching people try to shoehorn the churning spaghetti mess of dependencies and tooling that is the javascript ecosystem back into native platforms that have dedicated clean frameworks already.

It has gotten better of course, but the only reason we have so much engineering capital in Javascript is because it runs everywhere on the web. If everyone using typescript and ES6 transpilers could have just used a better language 10 years ago they would have.

It seems backwards to go from web tech to native, because native has always had numerous advantages as a platform over the web. Everything we have in the javascript ecosystem is just us saying "man I wish we could do this thing the non-web platforms can do already"

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