I think proprietary Electron apps better run in browser anyway because of trackers that you can disable via extensions.

So if you like the app, remember that the ram and the cpu you paid for doesn’t provide value unless it’s doing something. There’s no trophy you get at the end of your life for “most cumulative ram left idle”

This is a damn homicide lmao

There’s no trophy you get at the end of your life for “most cumulative ram left idle”

Some people like to use more than 1 app you know.

Also, RAM is never ever idle. It is used as filesystem cache when not used by programs thus speeding up read accesses significantly.

A lot of the time, the alternative would be a website running in the browser.

Well, there's also Tauri which requires slightly more testing since you actually use the device's built-in browser, so there might be differences. The upside is a much smaller bundle size, quick start-up times and often less RAM usage than with Electron.

What about laptop battery life? More CPU usage = less battery life. WHY DOES NO ONE GIVE A FUCK ABOUT BATTERY LIFE???

The single most reason I switched from Spotify to Apple Music is that I was sick of seeing the Spotify macOS app at the top of the "High Battery Usage" page on Activity Monitor. I also actually noticed less battery life. Fuck Electron. I avoid apps made in it like the plague.

Doesn't Qt provide native, cross platform UI? I agree with your post though.

lmao, yea. Besides, it’s not like electron is that bad either. We aren’t in 1990, why would you care if electron uses a gb of ram or ten processes or this or that… they think that native means good, but more often than not native means a shitty ugly unusable application that will work (not really) just on windows

I mean, sure, but:

1. The Windows File Manager is really just awful in that regard. You can get alternative file managers that start up in a fraction of that time, with more features.

2. Startup time isn't really the worst of it. RAM usage is worse. And if a program uses lots of RAM, it will still appear quite performant. But it makes everything else on your system slower.

That's not a compliment to Electron, that's a heck of an indictment to Microsoft messing up the File Manager.

I mean sure once you start getting big enough, you'd probably be bundling all the features of chromium anyways, and any extra bloat is meaningless. Chromium and thus electron are extremely well optimized so if you are using the full feature set it will be fast.

But please stop using vscode as the benchmark electron app. It is not comparable. No other application in history has as large of a talent pool as vscode and It's possible none ever will either.

That's because all the important bits in VSCode are reimplemented in C++

opens chromiums dev tools

It always seemed over-complicated to me to use web technologies to create a desktop application and run it in what is essentially a browser. The tool-chain of modern web and electron apps also seems overly complicated to me (writing in a slightly different language then transpiling to an interpreted language).

I don't find JS any more accessible than any other language with automatic memory management. JS is actually a bit of mess due to bolting on new features while keeping backward compatibility.

I don't mind using electron apps. VS Code is pretty great.

I think Java Swing was the apex of desktop development :)

I like that for every Electron meme there's a Tauri comment.

and vscode

it’s hard to do without them

Just load the wrapped website in a browser.

It kinda do though. VSCode, without a project open has 10 processes running and uses over a half gig of ram. I like VSCode to be clear. I also like discord but it's just a chat app and apparently needs a half gig itself and 6 processes.