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Comment by dreamcompiler | Hacker News Reader

Wait, what??

Electron apps contain a local web server. (That's part of the reason they're such resource hogs.) In principle at least they work offline. Github's desktop app, for example, works fine on a disconnected machine. You obviously cannot push or pull, but you can do local git operations with the GUI.

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I think GP was complaining about "most apps that are built with Electron", not Electron itself.

The complaint supplies equally well to most mobile apps today.

Electron apps contain an entire headless browser. How anyone ever thought this was a good idea blows my mind.

I actually think it would be a great idea iff they would use a webview, which every OS provides nowadays. Apparently I'm not the first person who's thought of this.

https://blog.stevensanderson.com/2019/11/01/exploring-lighte...

That strategy of "web applications on the desktop" was actually pioneered over 20 years ago by Microsoft:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application

Even in the Windows world, they were never all that popular.

HTAs were not cross-platform; Electron is. Furthermore HTML5 and JS are much more capable now than they were prior to Windows Vista.

That's why Electron is popular and HTA wasn't. But Electron is still the worst possible example of the resource inefficiency of static linking.

Great article. I am not keen on relying on Edge for Windows, but that solution is a hell of a lot better than Electron.

From size considerations, Electron apps can be more precisely described as a browser containing exactly one web app that it always runs.

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