I often see people talking about the fact that they like a certain open-source application, but ‘it’s a shame it’s on Electron’; what does this mean? Is it a privacy thing or a resource thing?
I often see people talking about the fact that they like a certain open-source application, but ‘it’s a shame it’s on Electron’; what does this mean? Is it a privacy thing or a resource thing?
People complain about Electron, but without it there would probably be even fewer cross-platform apps today
Some aspects of it might be less than perfect, but let’s not allow perfect to be the enemy of good
Electron doesn’t automatically mean that an app is bad, just like Unity doesn’t automatically mean that a game is good
Completely agree, thanks to Electron we now have many mainstream apps working on Linux and that just wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Whatever technological problems Electron has can be addressed down the road, and are outweighed by the value of lowering the barrier of creating cross-platform applications.
I’d be less hateful of Electron if it simply allowed me to use Mozilla Gecko instead of Chromium as the rendering engine.
You mean something similar to XULRunner?
Pluggable engines would be nice, but I feel like it’s less of a concern for stuff like Electron where you’re making apps with it. I’d be more interested in addressing memory usage and cutting out stuff that’s not really needed for apps that’s part of the browser engine. Ideally, it should be modular so that you can include just the stuff your app uses to keep it lean. Perhaps using an approach similar to GraalVM could be taken as well to reduce resource usage.
Or you could just use the offline functionality built into browsers nowadays instead of Electron.