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Comment by niutech | Hacker News Reader

If it runs in a web browser, why bother Electron if you can just install a standalone web app in Chromium-based browsers (or Firefox with PWA extension)? I do this with Slack, Teams, Discord, Gmail and they use less RAM since they reuse a shared web engine.

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Some applications benefit from the host integration. VSCode in particular, since it interacts with the terminal and other applications. I'm also assuming 1Password benefits from it as well for full OS integration.

But then they don't need to be made as Electron apps, but rather native apps, which use a fraction of resources. Compare e.g. Sublime Text or Notepad++ with VS Code.

But then they wouldn’t work in the browser.

There’s certainly a place for truly native apps, but there are also a lot of reasons companies keep picking Electron. Efficiency is just one consideration.

They could, using Wasm, like Qt, Blazor Hybrid, Uno Platform, Avalonia.FuncUI. Electron is efficient for devs, but inefficient for users, being a memory hog, especially on low end devices.

They could do that today, but do they? I can’t name one app that uses one of those to run in a browser. I can name multiple highly successful apps that use Electron.

I seriously doubt the approach of running a native desktop application in the browser would give you performance or usability as good as running an actual web app.

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