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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Electron means they're not wasting your heard-earned money. They're hardly spending any of it (on the desktop app, that is).

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Electron in almost every case means the user’s hard earned money is being wasted by more power consumption and more use of RAM (which increases disk I/O). Considering that it’s across many users, the hyperbolic statement would be that it’s an environmentally unfriendly option.

Or do what the rest of us have done and configure our usual clients with IMAP access.

I’d rather Fastmail ship their web client in Electron than waste engineering resources on reinventing the wheel for a client that’d get it’s own share of endless complaints from people wanting it to be more like Outlook or Thunderbird or Mutt.

I'm pretty sure the GP was talking about their subscription payments to Fastmail.

But I admit that you got me curious, do you really expect a substantial increase in power consumption due to Fastmail getting a % of their customers to run Electron instead of Thunderbird? I'm really bad at this kind of back-of-the-envelope math but I struggle to imagine that it's substantial.

Like wouldn't one kid in Nebraska playing an AAA game in anger for half an hour, on one computer, once a day, use more energy than all those electron installs combined?

Considering those same users would likely just be using a tab in another Chrome based browser for the webmail, it's probably a rough wash.

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