Hacker News Reader

Comment by Grombobulous | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

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.

> 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.

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.

Do you have an employer?

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com