Because why go for native performance when you can go for minimum effort on all platforms.
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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When all you have is ~~a hammer~~ JavaScript, everything looks like a ~~nail~~ web page.
Kids these days don't bother learning languages that actually compile to native apps.
All of my degree was in C, C++, C#, Java, etc. and the one class I had that did web applications did Java backends and middleware with PHP frontends. It wasn’t until I got into the industry that I had to learn Angular, Electron, React, Django, etc.
I don’t think it’s the devs making these decisions.
It's the minimum effort that translates to minimum time that translates to minimum cost for the business. Why hire another developer for a mobile app (or another platform) when you could just have the same web dev write it. Or without hiring another dev, why have the same dev need to build up tooling in another language when you can just reuse from the existing platform
Exactly, that and the “we are a [insert product name here] shop” mentality. The things I have had to fight for over the years are mind boggling.
It is the devs. Management says they need it fast then the devs say "fuck you here's your browser tab app".
I deam of a dev job that would let me actually write a good app..
To add insult to injury, the demands are often really unclear. Changing something in an electron app is often pretty straight forward. Not so much in a C# or especially C++ app
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Because you want a cross platform solution?
I get that electron can be slow, bloated, etc, but the amount of ire it draws is overboard.
Yes but sometimes, for example core parts of windows 11 like the start menu, don't need to be cross platform and should be native, not a pwa
Especially since they had already native code in previous windows...
Lol I mean I would never use windows 11 or defend that use of it. I'm just saying a valid use of electron is to target multiple platforms with minimal development hurdles.
Having built applications with Microsoft's mfc, Java's swing, the omnipresent Qt, and whatever nastiness Mac was using in the early 00's, electron is worth the silliness. Trust me. Trust me.
the omnipresent Qt
So weird. I spent more than two years of my career working on a Qt app (not by choice) but I've never met another human being who has ever even heard of Qt. Nothing else has ever made me so certain that I'm clinically insane.
My favorite thing about Qt was the use of C++ for the back end and Javascript for the UI layer. It lets companies take advantage of the, uh, four people in the world who are good with both languages.
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Because different OSes follow different Human Interaction Guidelines and I expect that applications follow the native look and feel.
following every linux de/wm's interaction guidelines seems pretty hard
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Electron is broken in implementation
We need something like React native for desktop
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I know it's easy to dunk on Electron... but have any of yall written any desktop apps with native frameworks? I wrote a small GTK4+Vala app once and I discovered desktop frameworks are very different than developing webapps. Customizing the look, feel, interaction of elements, and general mechanics, seems like a toooon of effort. (It kinda seems like you're not supposed to customize it.) Web development is waaaaaaaay more friendly towards customization. Which as a company, you want your app to look like your company, not some generic OS bundled app.
And then you have to repeat all that effort for crappleOS and Wangblows?... And then you gotta hope that it's even possible to do the thing you want in different OSes. Sheesh.
I mean, I'd be happy if everything was native apps, but I also understand why people don't tend to choose that route.
That's kind of the point of the frameworks though? Electron apps suck not only because of resource footprint, they don't look and feel native, if they have any accessibility it's usually custom and different for every program. Too much customization is bad.
I remember the times before UI toolkits took over. These programs had soul and were beautiful in their own way, but you had to learn how UI elements worked in each of them separately. The same thing happens with web apps now. Tab and the other usual keyboard shortcuts rarely work, controls are all custom.
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Once upon a time, we differentiated our apps based on their capabilities and gave them a consistent interface so people who knew how to use Windows|Linux|MacOS apps would already be familiar with how they operated. Now we differentiate on looks/user experience, and many of them arent capable at all.
People took the wrong lessons from beautiful GUI design. Anyone who felt it was just aesthetics missed the point. It wasn’t just flashy UI on what boils down to a database.
Which as a company, you want your app to look like your company, not some generic OS bundled app
Consistency of UI used to be treasured.
Customizing the look, feel, interaction of elements, and general mechanics, seems like a toooon of effort. (It kinda seems like you’re not supposed to customize it.)
Holy shit, he figured it out!
So yeah, it turns out that platform human interface guidelines are a thing, and for good reason.
Sorry but the window real estate of an application isn't meant for branding and advertisement. For that you have splash screens and the about dialogue, or even the help pages. And for more branding your webpage.
Customizing the look, feel, interaction of elements, and general mechanics, seems like a toooon of effort. (It kinda seems like you’re not supposed to customize it.)
Sometimes all of this is there for a reason. I used to really hate standard Windows (and I still do) but it had one big advantage: everything was accessible, in the sense that it all worked very well for blind and vision-impaired people. Usually when people create their own custom look and feel etc. they never accommodate accessibility at all.
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This edit is really well done.
Everyone should have to make one native app before being allowed to make fun of electron/webviews.
Counterpoint: Every developer should have to test their app on a machine with 1 GB of RAM and a dialup modem before inflicting their bloat on the rest of the world.
I just tried doing some work on a convention center WiFi connection in a small town. And it was clear the software I was using had no concept of slow internet. No progress bars on downloads, no resuming when connections dropped.
Everything just assumes max performance and fast network.
works on my machine
I remember some years ago when a version of MSDN came out that had clearly been developed entirely on enormously wide monitors. Despite word-wrapping being a problem that the programming world solved many decades ago, this version of MSDN had completely fucked it up and you could only read it on a normal laptop screen by scrolling left and right with the horizontal scroll bar for every line. I spent months copying every article I needed to read into Notepad.
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What are you talking about? I love having five apps all download the same 20mb node libraries each running their own Chrome sandbox processes all because they can't share them amongst themselves.
e
I get that it sucks. Are there any alternatives, where I have one codebase for all platforms?
It depends on what you are trying to do
Qt isn't bad and runs cross platform
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Lol, this is funny
Meanwhile, I have to install my third freedesktop 1GB dependency for 4 flatpak apps. What I wouldn't give for a slim 100mb electron package... All my electron apps as appimages are less than 1gb total.
But hey, at least native apps are so much faster. I have to get out an atomic clock to really see those microseconds that Zed is saving me compared to VSCode. You can even use the extra battery you gain to do one extra Rust compilation from scratch!
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