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Comment by miroljub | Hacker News Reader

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miroljub

Let's hope it's not just another Electron-based abomination.

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That ship has sailed. If I look at my Dock right now, from left to right I'm running:

- Nautilus

- Brave (Chromium)

- Gnome-terminal

- VSCode (Electron)

- Telegram Desktop (̶E̶l̶e̶c̶t̶r̶o̶n̶ QT)[1]

- WhatsApp (web wrapper in Electron)[1]

- Discord (Electron)

- Spotify (Chromium Embedded Framework)

- Betterbird (Gecko, might as well be Electron)

- TickTick (Electron)

- Steam (Chromium Embedded Framework)

In a way it is very interesting to me, Chromium has pretty much become a "kernel" of sorts that all web technologies run atop. And I don't really buy the "Chromium gives Google power over the web", as it is permissively licensed, and there is at least one other giant stakeholder in the form of Microsoft.

Kind of makes me wish GNU and Apple would do what Microsoft has done, integrate a Chromium-based WebView into the OS and optimize it to the gills. The battle between Blink (Chromium), WebKit and Gecko has already been lost, might as well give your users the best UX they can get.

[1]There is work being done on native GTK clients by third parties, namely

- Paper Plane for Telegram: https://github.com/paper-plane-developers/paper-plane

- Whakarere for Whatsapp: https://github.com/tobagin/whakarere

> Kind of makes me wish GNU and Apple would do what Microsoft has done, integrate a Chromium-based WebView into the OS

It’s not Chromium based but Apple does have exactly this in the OS. Given both Chromium and WebKit target the same web standards there should be a solid crossover. The reality isn’t there but it wouldn’t take much (except for willingness on Apple’s part, which is hard to come by)

Yeah I know Apple has their own WkWebview (maybe they were even the first? not sure). But as you pointed out, it requires devs to look out for any edge cases / missing features it has in comparison to Chromium's Webview.

The nice thing about a universal Webview is that devs no longer have to spend time testing across web engines. All they would have to do is test against a few generations of Chromium.

I know that's not a thing free software stans like to think about or hear because its already been happening in slow-motion, with less and less devs testing against anything but Chromium, but I feel there are strong benefits to it.

In a way its the SystemD debacle all over again. Centralization like that feels spooky and very un-unixy, but it brings such an enormous host of benefits.

Telegram Desktop is fortunately not an electron app. It's Qt.

Thanks, edited!

I must admit it / its performance feels very "webby"

That's strange. It's by far the snappiest, modern IM app that I've used.

How is telegram Electron if it's https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop C++/QT?

Thanks, for letting me know, edited!

Its performance has always felt very "webby" to me. Goes to show native is not a silver bullet for all our UI responsiveness woes :)

It's very snappy for me on Plasma. One of the fastest apps actually.

The official Telegram client is Qt on Windows and Linux and AppKit on macOS, not Electron.

> Kind of makes me wish GNU and Apple would do what Microsoft has done, integrate a Chromium-based WebView into the OS and optimize it to the gills.

For MacOS, you can almost always get high quality native apps. I don't know why this isn't the case on other platforms.

Strangely enough, it is mostly the mega-corps that insist on not making native apps, even though they should have all resources for it: VSCode, Spotify, YouTube, WhatsApp. Through and through laggy garbage apps if you don't have the latest machine.

>laggy garbage apps if you don't have the latest machine.

Does not describe Youtube.com or VSCode in my experience.

If you're on an Intel MacBook, using YouTube Music is a miserable experience. As for YouTube.com itself, it's okay, but FreeTube is significantly more responsive.

VSCode was more laggy than native competitors on my machine. Especially when selecting text. Maybe our tolerance for lag is different? I know a ton of people swear by VSCode, but when an app has bad latency on basic interface functions it just throws me off. People with higher lag/latency tolerance may be right, that it's worth the trade-off to get an otherwise better app. But I will always go for non-lag native apps.

>VSCode was more laggy than native competitors on my machine.

VSCode has become really fast in the last year or so. Previously, I sometimes used other text editors for a quick edit, but now any lag that VSCode may still have has fallen below my personal sensory threshold.

I dread the situations where I have to resort to Xcode. It's native, but it's unbelievably slow and crashes more often than any software I have used since Windows 3.1.

Maybe it's time to give it another try, then. It was about two years ago that I gave it a test ride.

> VSCode was more laggy than native competitors on my machine. Especially when selecting text. Maybe our tolerance for lag is different?

This is interesting because when I measured that a couple years ago it was one of the fastest options, right up with the native apps. I wonder whether there’s something like display scaling or an extension responsible for the difference.

> And I don't really buy the "Chromium gives Google power over the web", as it is permissively licensed, and there is at least one other giant stakeholder in the form of Microsoft.

Google completely controls Chromium, it is their project, they decide what patches are accepted into the code. Microsoft Edge just like Brave and the other forks all depend on Google for the actual code, all they do is add some minor features. Google does not care about Microsoft's opinion regarding Chromium's direction.

You have a deep misunderstanding of what "control" means.

So we need to to better optimise Electron to lower memory usage and CPU resources.

A simple XSS turns into RCE with Electron desktop apps. I don't understand how technically competent people can in good faith accept this outrageous risk.

At least then we could say "A Proton got an Electron".

And they could therefore call their app "Hydrogen", to make it more nerdy.

Sorry that was useless.

It probably is. Since they already have a working web app, why would they throw all that away and start a new project from scratch targeting 3 platforms (MacOS, Linux and Windows) and triple the maintenance burden?

I'm assuming they have reworked their current web app into an electron (or similar) desktop application and going forward they can make changes and immediately push out to both web and desktop.

We should ask people who complain about Electron apps if they're willing to pay an extra $20/month to pay for a team of developers to make and maintain a native app for each platform.

I'd bet they say no. If they say yes, they're lying.

I'm on Linux and elecron apps are always good news for me, because I know I won't be left out ;)

Unless you're using Evernote. Private Beta for Evernote for Linux and afterwards..... An email saying they are stopping the development of Evernote Linux :)

PS: Electron, AFAIK.

Damn, that's some low effort for Linux people. Well I’m using Obsidian. They’re on some old version of electron. Which is annoying but it works well other than that it requires some exception in my Nix config.

CEO at Missive and proud developer of an electron based email client, I would love for you to try it and judge it's speed. It might change your opinion.

There is no performant snappy Electron app. Period.

The problem is not when everything is written with web as the main central point, the problem is when you compare that with a previous version that was a desktop client first, then in a rush to make it cross-platform they fuck it up. Hence the hate for Electron, because 99% of Electron apps out there are like this.

I am a very happy Missive user and have no qualms about their desktop client. I kind of knew it was likely Electron, but it is so performant that it really didn't cross my mind that it was non-native. People bashing Electron apps is just a trope these days; like anything else, there are good ones and bad ones.

It is. And like a typical Electron app, it installs automatically in a user-writable location, ignoring basic security standards.