Claude's Criminally Bad Electron Mac App Is an Inside Job | Hacker News Reader

Claude's Criminally Bad Electron Mac App Is an Inside Job

daringfireball.net

26 pointsGavinAnderegg22 comments

> Windows uses Philips head screws, Linux uses hex screws, and MacOS requires Torx — but a hammer works the same way with all screws. That’s Electron.

Heh.

As a fellow Electron maintainer, I want to say that Felix is a great engineer and an incredibly kind person. He is not an evil mastermind as portrayed in the article. We should be thankful for his contributions to the world of computing.

Hate on the Claude desktop app on macOS all you want (I personally think it’s fine), but I don’t understand how Gruber can think the ChatGPT app is that good. It’s also…fine, but certainly not special IMO, despite being a native app.

I have gemini and chatgpt apps - I think gemini is electron app since i can three finger tap to get word definition. Neither can pinch to zoom, print (i.e. to pdf), run extensions, duplicate tab, etc.

Gemini uses 208 mb vs 171 for chatgpt.

> I don’t understand how Gruber can think the ChatGPT app is that good. It’s also…fine,

It's not that ChatGPT is so good; it follows macOS design principles and functionality that have existed for decades. Claude Desktop sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t which can be a frustrating user experience.

It's the Mac version of OpenAI's Codex app where you see the night and day difference between the two.

I think it’s incredibly poor form for somebody with the reach and clout of Jon Gruber to be naming and shaming an individual engineer like this. At the very least he could have tried to get the other guy’s side.

I'm one of the project maintainers for Electron (not felixrieseberg) and the level of spitefulness in this post and some of Gruber's other recent articles about Electron is really starting to bother me.

It's fine for Gruber to dislike software, even to passionately hate it I guess. But this article is borderline conspiracy theory stuff singling out one (very friendly and easy-going!) engineer as the source of all his problems. Can anyone take his claim seriously that one person is the reason the entire industry, from indies to the biggest tech companies, has been building web-based/cross-platform desktop apps for the past 15 years?

What's sad is that Gruber and Felix would get along great in real life. I know Gruber doesn't see it this way, but Felix is a knowledgeable Mac developer who has spent a career building successful Mac apps and Mac development tools. As fellow Mac devs, the two of them would be able to get into the weeds about AppKit and Objective-C and the pros and cons of different frameworks and APIs, App Store sandboxing, and so on.

Frankly, Gruber needs to chill about this topic and get some perspective. Electron is not an evil plot to destroy everything that is good and pure about the Mac. It's a completely free and independent open source project maintained by a diverse group of developers, often on a volunteer basis outside of our jobs. We have no ill will toward apps that aren't made in Electron, we use other frameworks and tools ourselves. We love desktop apps and supporting the ecosystem, that's what drives us in the first place, and this antagonism is completely one-sided.

If Electron is successful it's because it's doing a good job at filling a niche for desktop apps that the platform vendors mostly continue to ignore. It helps that Electron gets regular updates with bug fixes and features, including new macOS integrations, and we provide free support for developers and extensive documentation. Trying to shame people just because they work on the framework or use it to build apps is not going to make alternatives any more appealing.

Proprietary platform-specific software has had its day. There are performant electron apps, so a better approach would be for AI to entrench the practices that achieve that and focus on high-quality shared/reusable code rather than end up maintaining and testing Win, Mac, Linux, Web and Android variants expressed in different languages/environments. The only plus side there is iOS bans that nature of software entirely so one less platform to support lmao.

It’s not just performance but also quality. There are a ton of things which you get out of a native app which Electron developers who aren’t the VSC team never do. It’s almost always obvious who cared about UX more than portability, but the cost differential usually wins out.

Theoretically AI could help with this by making it easier to support multiple interfaces for the same backend functionality but it would run into the challenge of measuring good taste. A good Mac app has lots of interactive aspects which you notice while using it, and would have to be non-trivial to express in ways which a bot could measure.

> There are performant electron apps

Somehow I don’t think sucking up 300+Mb of RAM to display 15Kb of text is anywhere within the realm of “performant”, especially when a native app can do the same in 1/30,000 as much RAM.

And with RAM prices to spike another 60-80% before the end of the year, Electron apps are a downright moronic and utterly brain-dead choice, to say nothing about failing to read not only the entire room, but an entire stadium filled to capacity. People are desperate to stretch RAM as far as they can, and Electron is the worst possible choice for that.

I would eagerly categorize any greenfield project using Electron as being absolutely retarded. The mentally incapacitated definition. Because that’s what any such decision-makers are.

I mean, if you truly want a write-once, work everywhere platform without any kind of a required runtime, there is DotNet.

Browsers have been doing this well for over a decade and have tons of superiority.

My favourite that kinda settles this debate is - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48168058

We know an exception doesn’t necessarily prove the rule. macOS has always had superior text rendering support since the NeXT days.

SwiftUI is immature but getting better. There have been tons of AppKit apps with excellent text support. Don't know what this guys problem is.

A native macOS app done correctly is superior to a web app in virtually every way. Claude Desktop won't be a best-in-class app if it remains a web app. Simple as that.

Browsers have been able to do this, but clear note: a single browser displaying many web pages in tabs.

Think of how most any modern computer would grind to a halt if every tab was its own full-fat web browser.

And THAT is the problem with Electron.

It’s not one installed framework providing the foundation for whatever number of apps you want to use, it’s a single electron framework for each and every app.

And that shit adds up, fast.

Electron isn’t like the JVM, which exists only once per computer and which can run dozens of different apps from a singular foundation. Electron is a completely self-contained system that will exist once for every app that is built on top of it. You have twelve Electron apps up and running, you have twelve obscenely bloated instances of Electron causing your computer to run out of physical RAM and thrashing the paging file to hell and back.

RAM doesn’t grow on trees. Prices are set to spike another 40-60% before the end of the year, above and beyond their already insane valuations. Anyone looking to use Electron in a greenfield project in this current environment is totally ignoring the current RAM crunch, and is spitting gratuitously in the faces of their users. And IMHO, doing so is moronic. There is no other way to spin that under current RAM conditions.

Writing on the wall is Apple needs to do something about it. Safari's Add to dock is decent start - I use it with Slack and Discord, but couldn't wait for Gemini and Anthropic to release their native apps (can't remember why). And of course once they did it was long wait for them to re-invent browser features.

> Proprietary platform-specific software has had its day.

If the purported benefits of agentic-coding systems are real, it should have been trivial for Anthropic to implement a native macOS application, and sell it as a benefit, no? The whole reason Electron was being pushed is because it reduces development effort, but AI should be able to nullify it based on Anthropic's own messaging.

There's still a lot of cognitive overhead adjacent to the code that grows with each platform you're supporting, because you're still having to QA and debug and build and run tests and review code changes in multiple languages with wildly different tooling and dependencies.

AI has to get these native builds perfect for each platform whereas with Electron it's like... write once run anywhere evolves into perfect it once, perfect it everywhere.

> If the purported benefits of agentic-coding systems are real, it should have been trivial for Anthropic to implement a native macOS application, and sell it as a benefit, no?

Absolutely. But there's the support, documentation and testing aspect and how they're setup.

To their credit, OpenAI acquired a team of experienced macOS developers when they bought Sky [1], the basis for the Mac version of Codex. Apple acquired Workflow from the same team years ago, which became Shortcuts, a core part of macOS's automation system.

Anthropic says 80% of their code is written by Claude; the remaining 20% requires some human expertise, especially with platform-specific features.

A native macOS version of Claude Desktop (and therefore Claude Cowork) would be a huge step forward for Anthropic. Hopefully it's a matter of when, not if.

[1]: https://www.macstories.net/news/sky-acquired-by-openai/

I mainly use mac apps, so I couldn't tell. Is it really that bad?

Nope, it really is not.

I didn't think it was so bad either. I guess it is all a matter of perspective.

Electron maintainer here. Electron is performant if the app developer writes good code. It's slow if someone writes bad code. That's the same if you use Apple's native APIs.

The big advantage of Electron is that it takes so much less effort to write an application and bring it to all operating systems. Thus, we get applications that would not have been developed if Electron did not exist.

Interesting take. Yes this is very important in many go to market plans to be able to deploy on multiple operating systems without hiring new people that are experts in each one, or spending a lot of time on different deployments.

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