I'm not sure why there's so much Electron hate? Big and bloated, sure-ish? But my 2014 MacBook AIR with 8 GB Ram that I didn't pay much for seems to run several Electron apps just fine? And I don't care. Sure, sometimes I shut down WhatsApp and Slack when I'm going mobile to make sure I maximize my battery life. But I do the same thing with Chrome.
Electron does allow people to build projects quickly using simpler HTML/CSS/JavaScript technologies than prior-era desktop applications, and you get cross-platform for almost nothing.
> Electron does allow people to build projects quickly using simpler HTML/CSS/JavaScript technologies than prior-era desktop applications, and you get cross-platform for almost nothing.
Free cross-platform is a good thing, I agree, though it comes at the cost of lowered interoperability and inconsistency with other applications and OS's conventions - which is a big usability issue. But the "build quickly using simpler web technologies" part? That's a problem right here - it essentially makes it easier to create low-quality cookie-cutter app, instead of forcing people to do this well. It's not that much more effort to learn something beyond JS, but it seems that these days a lot of devs think their education ends at their first job.
I don't have the same OS's convention problems that others have. I live with three OS's daily, and I actually like the apps like Slack and WhatsApp that span those OS boundaries and just work the same way.
Apple charges about $1/GB for upgrading SSDs in their laptops. I think Electron adds at least 150MB to everything. If you have 2 or 3 Electron apps it's not a big deal, but if you have 20-30 it gets a bit annoying.
Building quickly is rarely a good sign about the quality of the thing that is built. I think a better pitch for electron is simply consistency across platforms, albeit the lowest common denominator sort: slack is pretty terrible on all platforms, but equally so.
What specifically is terrible about slack across the platforms? I actually like it and I like having it run as a separate app so I can quickly hot-tab swap to it. It's also better than all the other legacy Group chat apps it's replaced like Jabber (which is native as far as I can tell), MS Messenger, etc...
Compared to what? Compared to no chat app, slack is amazing. Compared to any commodity chat app, it’s a commodity chat app. The main pitch is that you can just throw money at it and not maintain it.
Could have been gchat if google had any clue how people work outside google. Instead they’re trying to write my emails for me.
Electron does allow people to build projects quickly using simpler HTML/CSS/JavaScript technologies than prior-era desktop applications, and you get cross-platform for almost nothing.