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?
Privacy wise: It uses Chromium, which has been shown to have plenty of phone homes back to Google. Even though it’s open source, even projects specifically intended to “de-Google” it, like the Ungoogled Chromium project, are adamant that they’re never sure that they’ve gotten all of it because it’s so pervasive – and Electron uses the vanilla Chromium code straight from Google.
Other than that, the other, bigger reason is that Electron is extremely inefficient. @dessalines@lemmy.ml mentioned an Electron chat app using 4GB of RAM, and that’s not an exaggeration. You can easily get multi-GB RAM usage on even simple Electron apps. It uses a lot of CPU power too, like when Visual Studio Code used 13% of a CPU just to make the cursor blink.
Basically, almost anything is a better app platform than Electron. A fully native app in a low-level language is obviously the standard for performance, but even if you don’t want to go through the trouble, languages like Java and Kotlin are still way better than Electron. Hell, even other interpreted languages like Python run circles around Electron, see Blender.