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Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

I was writing resizeable desktop applications in the 90s and it was easy then too. Differing screen resolutions is not a recent thing.

The reason for Electron's popularity is because:

1. web developers are cheaper and easier to hire than people with desktop software development experience

2. Electron is cross platform

Point 2 is a compelling reason. But it's not like other cross platform toolkits haven't existed. They've just been left to languish because of point 1.

If companies only hire web developers then of course everyone is going to invest time into writing Electron apps and banging on about the benefits of web applications. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

I say this with experience having watched the tides turn, first hand, as a software developer.

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I was there too with a Sony GDM-FW900 monitor with 2300x1400 resolution and my experience was very negative. Both as a user and as a developer (though I was just a kid getting started in ‘99). Any software that wasn’t made by a major company was a crapshoot and Delphi layout was brittle for my own apps. Anything that got deployed to university computers with their bulk purchased monitors was mostly fine except for the deployment process.

There are more web developers because it was a lot easier, even before npm existed and frontend frameworks went out of control. That’d didn’t happen in a vacuum - Electron was really late on the scene as far as frontend tech goes. It was originally made to support an IDE and not regular business apps and still won.

> I was there too with a Sony GDM-FW900 monitor

I’m talking about the early to mid 90s of web development and you reply with a monitor released around 2000. That’s a completely different era.

> with 2300x1400 resolution and my experience was very negative.

That’s more an issue with OSs not doing scaling back then than it is a problem with desktop software.

You’d still have the same issue today if you run a super high resolution with zero scaling.

> There are more web developers because it was a lot easier

It’s has a lower barrier for entry but I wouldn’t call it easier.

> even before […] frontend frameworks went out of control.

So you’re basically agreeing with me then. The current state of affairs is out of control.

> Electron was really late on the scene as far as frontend tech goes. It was originally made to support an IDE and not regular business apps and still won.

Its origins doesn’t disprove my point. Lots of things start out as one thing and evolve into something else. That isn’t unique to the web nor Electron.

I thought we were talking about "resizeable desktop applications in the 90s"? The reason I bring up that monitor is that I had the misfortune of using dozens of desktop applications written in the 90s to control lab equipment and spent copious amounts of time manually tiling them in all kinds of positions and sizes on a high resolution monitor. Scaling was definitely not the issue thanks to great eyesight. I was lucky if they supported a non 4:3 aspect ratio. Anything that wasn't a graphical or CAD or other app that did its own rendering or was developed by a large dev team was a crapshoot.

Lots of absolutely positioned buttons clipped by a resize, toolbars that didn't hide their buttons behind a menu when the window was too small, uncollapsible panels with minimum widths that exceeded the main content, and so on. Most of them were about as resizable as a water balloon when you smash it on the ground.

Lab equipment software has hardly been the pinnacle of desktop software. Even native desktop evangelists moan about the quality of some of that software. So I wouldn't use that as your benchmark given they're already known to be generally below par. In fact I'd go further than that and say lab software is notorious for having terrible UX.

I can assure you that plenty of good software did exist. I know this because I wrote some of it ;)

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