Comment by wiseowise | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wiseowise | Hacker News Reader

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> Electron is Flash for the Desktop.

Flash was awesome. It was proprietary, unstable, insecure, but in other regards it was much better than competition at the time.

Electron is open-source, stable and secure (as long as you stay up to date).

You’re making a compliment.

> * Non-native UI toolkit

That’s a drawback, not a plus. You can’t easily style the app with CSS the way you want it (VSCode, Obsidian).

> * Massive waste of resources (CPU, RAM, Battery, Disk). Consumption of 500 MB RAM for idle is the norm.

Nonsense. Obsidian is sitting at 115 MB right now, zero CPU.

> * Slow.

Define slow.

> * Often issues with autonomous, local operation.

???

> * Security -> Browser Engine

The only real drawback so far. Can be mitigated by staying up to date.

> It is always better to use a well-working application with your native UI-toolkit

It is always better to use whatever works best for you and solves your problems. Not OCDing around technology and not playing identity wars with crazy people online.

> Electron is used, when a company wants to save on developer.

Also a big plus. Features are being delivered to all platforms with less money spent. Win-win.

> All users pay with suffering from bad UI and their hardware resources. In this case it is something nobody asked for?

You need to seek therapy if you’re “suffering” from application using the toolkit.

P.S. Thunderbird performs worse than ANY Electron app I’ve ever used, and I’ve been using Electron since its inception.

From the post right below:

> I do have two questions. The app on my macOS system is using 700MB RAM; is that for Electron?

Shall we discuss any of the other claims? Your security solution are constant updates?

Invests in efficiency scales with users. Most things which suck are caused by laziness and cost saving. It would be far more efficient to help either Evolution, K-Mail and Thunderbird with access to special APIs and keep them stable.

> That’s a drawback, not a plus. You can’t easily style the app with CSS the way you want it (VSCode, Obsidian).

VSCode isn't really styled with CSS if you're a user. It's done by some json or yaml. This kind of hack is required: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=be5invis..., and it's clearly not supported.

You know what does have theming? Win32, GTK and QT. GTK even uses CSS for it.

And unlike electron apps, when you change how a button looks in your GTK theme it affects all GTK apps rather than just the single electron app.

> Nonsense. Obsidian is sitting at 115 MB right now, zero CPU.

I just downloaded obsidian for the first time and launching it spawns 8(!) processes using a total of 827.3 MB of RAM. That's at the launch screen, before it's doing anything.

Of course it's using no CPU when idle. That's basically the bare minimum bar for any application. It's well known that javascript is at least an order of magnitude slower than C. That's where it's wasting CPU, not when it's idle.

> Define slow.

Well to start off with, I can count the seconds obsidian takes to start up. Most native apps I have installed (other than browsers) start faster than I can reasonably react.

Typing has noticeable lag, see: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/27378

And this is on a workstation computer, I don't want to imagine how terrible the experience is on low-end hardware.

> P.S. Thunderbird performs worse than ANY Electron app I’ve ever used, and I’ve been using Electron since its inception.

Thunderbird isn't a native app either. Just like electron it's using a browser engine to show the UI.

> It's well known that javascript is at least an order of magnitude slower than C

If your base is base-2, yes. (It is well-understood that when you don't have your thumb on the scale—e.g. selecting, whether deliberately or carelessly, poor/pathological code to benchmark—that the expected slowdown factor of executing on a mainstream JS engine instead of AOT is in the neighborhood of 2x to 4x. Of course browsers JIT instead of AOT out of necessity—a constraint that doesn't apply to programs loaded from disk.)

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