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Comment by meetups323 | Hacker News Reader

Yep. When I saw the tired "Electron = bad" rant I immediately went to look for a tab entitled "Projects" to see if the author had created a native desktop app with "value"[1] equal to or greater than what a good Electron app provides (Slack, Spotify, Discord, VS Code). But lo and behold, no such tab.

[1]: [Electron apps] constantly crash and has no value over a native desktop application what so ever

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> Slack, Spotify, Discord

All those examples could or do work just as well as web apps, right? I don't think that's the authors message, but I'd rather have those type of apps be web-based instead of electron-based or native.

They are web apps... open.spotify.com, discord.com, app.slack.com. Even vscode.dev. The desktop product is just a repackaging of the web app with perhaps more OS integrations. If you don't want the OS integrations, use the web app. Some are available as a PWA too, which provides a nice middle ground.

They all have artificial restrictions in the web versions which makes them worse to encourage people to install the apps (actually not sure if discord does this, I've only used it a little bit). For spotify and slack there is definitely an active push to make their web apps worse than they need to be.

At least for VSCode, it's the other way around - the app was first, and even if it was always an Electron app, it was still designed and written for the desktop. It actually took some time and effort to port that to vscode.dev, which wasn't there at the beginning.

VS Code started as the Monaco editor, which was (and still is) first and foremost a code editor for web.

Electron apps are pretty much that tho. Just with extra access to the system that you wouldn't want to give to every web page.

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