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Comment by tower-shield | Hacker News Reader

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It is a marvelous thing. A beautiful app platform. Suddenly, one day, I was no longer Linux user without app. Linux app was standard. Everybody has Linux app. I had dual-boot Linux computer to play Valorant on Windows and to live normal life on Linux. And I use Mac at work. And it is all glorious because I no longer think about which is which. And there are people who are saying it is not amazing, but it is. I can hit Ctrl-R and the application refreshes. What an astounding tool.

For me the great app platforms:

* the terminal

* the iPhone/Android

* the web

And suddenly, the web is brought to the desktop and it is cross-platform. Everything is here on my Linux. It is the Year of the Linux Desktop and everyone is complaining about web platform. But it is web platform that has brought it here. Praise be the forces that made this happen. This man has a great website, and if he has made Electron then he is always welcome to me.

Now we got desktop (electron) apps blocking our VPNs via friggin cloudflare. I have come to absolutely loath cloudflare's BS.

I can’t find anything better than Electron/Tauri for building cross-platform desktop apps. The browser engine is quite efficient and performant for building complex interfaces

You have an interesting definition of "efficient and performant".

The core of Electron can be made quite efficient and performant. It's just that commercial app developers have few incentives to dedicate significant time and effort towards optimization when modern PCs are this powerful:

https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2025-electronAintBad

You're missing the "for building complex interfaces" part. I would extend that to "for building complex interfaces with even basic accessibility features" though.

And for what it's worth, Tauri and to a lesser extent Electron is actually quite efficient. It looks bloated as hell because it allocates all kinds of RAM pages it doesn't really use in case it needs to JIT extensively (which usually get compressed or swapped out anyway), but by default it's a decent UI framework.

Tauri takes what, maybe 50MiB of RAM? It's not the most efficient way, but it's as efficient as a usable cross-platform framework gets these days. Electron is four times that, which is still better than the alternative on Linux (which was running the Windows application on Wine before Electron came along).

Telegram is written in native Qt and takes about 1750MiB of RAM on my machine to show me a chat screen. The framework isn't the issue here.

Native apps are not automatically more responsive or less bloated. Look at Xcode or Visual Studio vs VSCode. Performance is mainly the result of how much effort you want to put into optimization.

Certainly the user does not feel the same.

Electron might be a good example of worse is better.

Electron was too good when I first saw it, and gave the "Javascript everywhere" for the desktop apps. Then quickly felt like a bloatware.

Like it or not, it was a significant achievement

To be fair; Node is involved in this too.

Please post generic snarky swipes like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

if (when) a better solution arises it will be the dominant solution. long live electron

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