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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

Similar to how taser training for law enforcement involves being tased themselves, I think Electron developers should have to use old computers for an extended period of time as their Electron development machines, just so they get an idea of what it feels like to be a user of their apps.

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They should have old computers as their manual testing machines forever, not any finite period.

For a moment, I thought you were gonna suggest that Electron developers should be tased in order to make them associate using Electron with pain.

If they don't learn their lesson from using the old computers, then this can be a last resort.

Although it's a complete pain to standardize the results, you can have benchmarks as part of your CI (It's a bit easier if you can use some kind of normalised measurement like cache misses per loop iteration, but rdpmc generally isn't allowed - or even available from the OS).

Latency from the user perspective is a bit harder, although I guess for a webpage you could run it headless into a video recording then time how long to go from a blank screen to showing information?

Sure but the fact that you need benchmarks and big performance optimizations in a chat app is a sign that your approach is very inefficient and slow. Especially considering the same feature set was available 30 years ago in computers that were less capable than my wrist watch.

I really like the idea behind Facebook's 2G Tuesdays, but I'm not sure if it helped achieve anything apart from PR, or if it's still going.

Ad networks are strongly incentivized to perform well on slow devices, since they are paid per impression. In contrast the most valuable clicks almost always occur on the most expensive devices.

Then Facebook goes ahead and builds Messenger for desktop on top of Electron.

If facebook doesn't have the money for the engineering effort to build a native messenger app, I don't know who does

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