I game very little these days, but have run mumble, ventrillo and teamspeak in the past and the problem was always the friction in onboarding people onto them, you’d have to exchange host, port, password at best, or worse, explain how to download, install and use.
Discord can run from a browser, making onboarding super easy. The installable app being in Electron makes for minimal (if any) difference between it and the website.
In summary, running in the web browser helps a lot, and Electron makes it very easy for them to keep the browser version first class.
As an added bonus, they can support Linux, Windows and macOS equally well.
I would say it helps as without Electron, serving all the above with equal feature parity just would have been too expensive or slow and perhaps it just wouldn’t have been as frictionless for all types of new users like it is.
Discord can run from a browser, making onboarding super easy. The installable app being in Electron makes for minimal (if any) difference between it and the website.
In summary, running in the web browser helps a lot, and Electron makes it very easy for them to keep the browser version first class.
As an added bonus, they can support Linux, Windows and macOS equally well.
I would say it helps as without Electron, serving all the above with equal feature parity just would have been too expensive or slow and perhaps it just wouldn’t have been as frictionless for all types of new users like it is.