
Ask HN: How can Microsoft improve/evolve electron, now that they own GitHub? - tumblen
Electron is a product that seems to have a love&#x2F;hate relationship with developers and users.<p>That being said, one of the most loved Electron applications, VSCode, is made by Microsoft and now Electron is essentially one of their assets.<p>It seems to me like this could mean good things for Electron.<p>Are there any ways you can think of that MS can improve that ecosystem?
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smaddock
There are a few Microsoft employees already working on improving Electron.
Notably helping keep it up-to-date with Chromium [1] (current release at v61—6
versions behind stable).

Security is an area that could use a lot of improvements. Along with keeping
Chromium up-to-date, sandboxing still needs more work [2].

Personally, I'd like to see greater support for Chrome Extensions instead of
Electron's preload scripts. They're much more powerful in terms of controlling
when scripts are run.

[1]
[https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/12477](https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/12477)

[2]
[https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/6712](https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/6712)

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iuguy
It's very clear there's several ways they could 'improve' it:

* Replacing Chromium with Edge to improve integration with Windows 10.

* Introducing .NET runtime integration

* SharePoint and O365 integration which with the above would make it almost as powerful as SilverLight

* Cortana support baked-in

* Windows Telemetry

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NullPrefix
>* Introducing .NET runtime integration

>* Windows Telemetry

Doesn't telemetry come by default with .NET ?

~~~
nathanaldensr
With .NET Core, yes. It's the one thing I hate about .NET Core.

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/dotnet/core/tools/telemetry](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/dotnet/core/tools/telemetry)

Simply put, any data gathering or telemetry that is _default opt-in_ deserves
scorn.

I say this as someone who's used Microsoft development tools since QBasic and
VB 3.

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DoofusOfDeath
Electron is open-source under an MIT license.

If Microsoft can do things now with Electron that it couldn't before, there's
arguably something wrong with the project.

~~~
bb88
> Electron is open-source under an MIT license.

It's not the license at issue, it's the copyright which allows MS to change
the license.

Yes, developers could fork the project, but that seems premature at this
point.

What will probably is that MS will make optimizations for VS Code to run even
better and then make those optimizations open for everyone.

~~~
giancarlostoro
>What will probably is that MS will make optimizations for VS Code to run even
better and then make those optimizations open for everyone.

They already could of with the MIT licensed Electron... Literally nothing
stopped them from doing this prior, unless the project as said has a bad
structure but I find it hard to believe.

~~~
bb88
Having control of the copyright gives you control of the development process
as well. So getting 1000 patches into a project just becomes a whole lot
easier if you own the copyright.

~~~
true_religion
If it is MIT, you can relicense, so effectively you have control of the
copyright.

~~~
giancarlostoro
It's as if everyone hates Microsoft enough to believe they have different
rights under the MIT license. MIT is as permissive as it gets, if Microsoft
wanted to they could of released VS Code as a close sourced but free (as in
money) product, and _NOBODY_ not even GitHub would of been able to stop them
either!

~~~
bb88
Yes, but then there would be two versions of Electron, the public version and
the private version MS would keep internally.

This would mean that you'd have to spend work re-merging your changes back
with the main branch when a new version of Electron came out.

Now there's just one version, and it looks like MS controls the copyright to
it. And that means their patches could come first before others.

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WorldMaker
Microsoft developers have already contributed directly to Electron.

That said, if there is a direction to hope for, it might be pushing more of
Electron's "value add" into the web platform itself (ie, open more standards
for PWAs to adopt). Though arguably many of the things that developers
particularly want from Electron like macOS menu integration are pretty
strongly platform-specific and tough to standardize in way that might make
sense to the web platform as a whole.

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chrisco255
I think MS is already involved with Electron at some level. They are probably
contributing to it since VSCode uses it. I think that they might be able to
improve VSCode even more if they were to somehow integrate the Atom ecosystem
into it and combine those editors.

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kumarharsh
I don't think something very dramatic can be done to fix electron - it was
already OSS, and as sibling comments are saying, MS was already involved at
some level.

But if the project is given the same governance model and love which VSCode
gets, I would have much higher hopes.

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butz
Progressive Web Apps are upcoming alternative to Electron. Microsoft already
added support for PWAs in Edge, now they should work with other browsers
vendors to add missing functionality, like file system access.

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Rjevski
Kill it with fire?

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flavio81
>Are there any ways you can think of that MS can improve that ecosystem?

Yes, by killing it.

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psyc
Same thing any motivated, funded, competent organization could have done at
any time. Replace it with something functionally equivalent, but optimized.

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nottorp
They could start with making Skype not lag horrendously while TYPING. Or
better yet, put out a native client again.

Dreams...

~~~
nottorp
Downvoters, I give you exhibit A:

[https://imgur.com/a/VRS3wkd](https://imgur.com/a/VRS3wkd)

What do those 3 apps have in common? They are brilliant Electron creations.
They manage to beat even Java IDEs in memory consumption for no good reason.

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asdsa5325
By never using Electron again.

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xkcd-sucks
Embrace, extend, extinguish

