This meme is really only true for things like Slack where the app is just the webpage in an app, and even then it's not quite true because Electron is a lot heavier than a webpage because it has to now run the webpage and the app - which I think is terrible.

But then also, Electron enables actual apps to be developed using web standards - which I think is great.

TLDR: Use Electron to make apps, not glorified webpages.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Slack IS an app.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Slack IS a webpage.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Calling Slack a webpage is like calling an office building a room.

Slack is just as much a complex app as anything else even if it's built on web tech and standards.

[–] firelizzard 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The point is that Slack does not take advantage of Electron at all. It’s no better than running it in a browser.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

For Slack it does. Building an app via Electron means it's cross-platform by default, so Slack doesn't need to invest in separate platform teams to solve the same problem (Windows, macOS, Linux).

Electron also has better support for things like native notifications, video and voice calls, offline capabilities, and to other native APIs etc that are either unsupported or spottily supported via the browser.

[–] pkill 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Flutter?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What about Flutter?

[–] pkill 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's a much more lightweight option for building cross platfrom apps than Electron. Heck, even Tauri is better than Electron even though it also uses web technologies for UI.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Flutter came to market much later. It wasn't even a thing when Slack started building using Electron. I'm sure the same applies to Tauri as well.

[+] railsdev 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It has all this support for native platforms yet it’s always a clunky memory hog

Maybe so but it has improved a lot over time. The app devs share some responsibility too so it's not all on Electron.

zero effort to respect the design language of the OS it’s running on.

That's the Dev's design choice, not a limitation of Electron.

I’m on macOS, I want the app to be a native macOS app. If I wanted it to look like a webpage, or Windows, or Linux GTK then I’d switch to one of those and expect it to match those paradigms.

I don't disagree but at the end of the day it doesn't matter to enough people for it to become an issue. People are used to Slack and the way it works.

Moreover the cost of building the same app 2x or 3x simply doesn't make business sense.

[+] railsdev 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

What happened to writing the “core” of an app that doesn’t rely on UI then simply writing the front ends for each platform you want to support?

What do you mean? I can't speak for Slack but I'm sure some degree of business logic / client side logic separation exists.

By the way, what you just described is the essence of cross-platform development, rather than an argument for building apps natively.

simply writing the front ends for each platform you want to support?

But why would you rewrite the "front-end" for each platform if you have one you could just port over? Who is going to pay for those 2x developers and what would be the ROI on this effort?

That’s just three (if you don’t write for a million desktops on Linux).

Is it really so hard to support just three environments with only the UI being tailored for the OS it’s running on?

In Slack's case I'd wager the answer to be a resounding YES. I don't think you fully grasp the full scope Slack's capabilities, and the amount of work involved to build native clients for not just one or two, but three different platforms - it's definitely not just the "UI".

Honestly, it just feels like poor tooling and a poor excuse.

Quite the opposite - frameworks like Electron let's devs with your skillset build with the stack you already know, and abstracts away quite a bit of the cross-platform complexities, which strangely enough is what you are suggesting but also what you are arguing against