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Comment by tekla | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that it made everyone's life worse.

Not mine. I loathe Electron like many people. But, as someone who is legally blind and has very limited vision, being able to have custom UI zoom levels, per application, has made my life much easier.

For a long time, and mostly out of frustration, I wanted to build my own stack of software around my vision. But the mammoth amount of effort it would require meant I never went through with it.

nice point, people like to shit on the web but it has one of the biggest accessibility features that most of the gui frameworks would just leave them as feature suggestions for years

I'd note that as stuff like A11y gets added into something like Discord, we'll see the app slowly bloat up to compensate.

Google Chrome generally used around 25mb per tab in 2010. Today, that number is often 500mb or even 1gb.

Would you really need 500mb for accessibility? Can't text to speech be outsourced to the OS or companion app?

And Windows apps had accessibility before computers had 25MB RAM in total. Accessibility is not the cause of bloat.

do any of these native GUI libraries provide just as rich accessibility experiences to disabled people?

If we mean native as in OS-specific GUI APIs built-in to the operating system, then yes. All of the browsers are abstractions on top of that. If we mean cross-platform GUI libraries for Rust I think your choices are like Dioxus (a webview), Tauri (also a webview), Slint (draws its own widgets), and maybe Fltk (draws its own widgets) with extensions?

Yes, yes they do. WXDragon for Rust, for example, provides quite good accessibility. And maybe accessibility would be better for frameworks like QT or DearImGUI if (1) people didn't act like the web was some paragon of accessibility (hint: it really, really isn't, not when websites misuse web APIs -- which happens quite frequently) and (2) UI framework developers didn't just make a UI framework that looked sexy but left accessibility on the floor.

What's oddly being ignored in this entire thread (so far, as of the time of writing) is that back in 2017-2018 Discord was an Electron app and was completely inaccessible. The web did not magically bring accessibility to the table -- we disabled people had to go yell at Discord to fix their shit, and even then it took them like 2-3 years, and even now Discord has some very very weird accessibility issues that will randomly crop up here and there.

The article implies that a11y will exist on launch and maybe already is.

And it doesn't require that huge amount of RAM, no. What requires the Chrome RAM is running JavaScript and do it fast, and a lot of extremely complicated features, most of which a single app will never use.

This is mostly because websites have gotten heavier and we want them to run faster.

How much of that is due to chrome, and how much is because say Jira and YouTube are incredibly bloated?

All the native APIs across major platforms have accessibility features, how do you think browsers implement theirs?

i switched a cross platform application TO web stack for this reason. accessibility and screen reader usability is incredibly important and massively overlooked in many domains

Already done. Windows scales dialog resources according to font size, gtk has text only scaling.

The Windows settings scale resources for the OS, not per application. The more applications you use, the worse these settings become. If I'm unable to use an application's own features to modify the size of something in its UI, I have to fall back to the Windows settings. That leads to the following:

1. Use the make everything bigger/font size settings to change the size of what I currently can't see

2. Restart

3. Open every application I need, and go through every major feature in each of them to determine if I can still see things comfortably, while making sure no elements have exploded in size as this also leads to usability problems

4. If not, go to 1

I have to do this every time I install a new application, or one of them updates and changes their UI or decides to opt into the Windows accessibility settings. The latter one happened a few years ago with Firefox, and cost me a day to sort.

Invariably, it leads me to compromising on what I can and can't see.

The electron hate train needs to pull in to the station and be retired. We can just admit that it was a good solution for the problems of its time just like JQuery. Electron was conceived over a decade ago and it was an imperfect solution, but there’s no denying that it was a solution.

Election predates WebAssembly by 5 years and hit the scene only one year after Rust was first created.

And just like JQuery, its time is coming to a close as better frameworks are available now that weren’t available back then.

I never thought election was a good solution for the problems of its time. Just call it a web app and don't lie to people releasing something "native" for them to download.

Noone is claiming that, though.

Discord isn't packaged as an Electron app simply because it pretends to be native, but because it has an entire system integration layer that isn't available in the web version.

Discord actually launched as a web app, and then moved to adding a desktop app, which has quite obviously become far more popular than visiting discordapp.com and using it in the browser.

Why do you think that is?

I'll give you a hint: if I close my web browser, how do I get a notification that I got a new message? Make sure you also pretend it's 2015 (launch year of Discord) and that I might be using Firefox, Safari, or Edge.

The funny part about this complaint is that you can literally just use the web app if you hate the desktop Electron app so much. That's one of the main benefits of Electron!

> We can just admit that it was a good solution for the problems of its time just like JQuery.

We would be lying if we did that. Electron was never, ever a good solution. It was something solely used by devs who prioritized their own ease of work over the actual user experience, i.e. bad devs.

Do you have an employer?

Its a straight-up business decision, generally made by MBAs and with advice from engineers and executed by the engineers. That's because it changes the shape of the org when you need a separate team for each platform, so any org where the benefit of doing so doesn't get articulated sufficiently, will end up with fewer devs covering more platforms.

Acting like this is a decision the ICs make is disconnected from why electron is so prevalent.

If it’s so easy to provide a better user experience using something else besides Electron then logically you should be able to point to chat apps that won over more user adoption than Slack and Discord.

Someone would have been able to disrupt that market by making a much better chat app since Elecron is so bad for user experience.

It was never a good solution and there is no reason to ever stop calling a turd a turd.

We could, if people would stop doing it today.

I made a bunch of Electron apps in my time. I always tried to talk the client out of it. "Just make it a website" I would say. Still, there were times where it made sense.

Electron was an ok solution to the problem they were looking at, “how do I waste as much compute as possible.” Unfortunately it had the side effect of drawing a bunch of stuff on the screen.

Luckily in the modern era we have invented language models, which allow us to expend vast resources on text generation instead.

It was only a solution to Web developers that refused to learn anything else.

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