Yes, what you also get is terrible battery life, terrible performance, and terrible UI. It is immediately obvious any time you use an electron app on osx because you immediately hit non-standard UI behavior, and basic errors with hotkeys.
So by using electron you've made your life easier, but have produce an app that is much worse for the people actually using it.
No, it's not that bad. I think most people who complain about Electron are power Mac users, mostly because Apple's UX is different and special, and Electron doesn't always follow that. As a Linux user, i have zero problems with Electron apps, provided they don't waste resources.
In terms of speed and resource consumption, it's entirely up to the app - i use VS Code and Obsidian which are very fast and lightweight (relatively, for what it is, for VS Code).
On my system, about 20% of my installed apps are Electron now, and this number is growing. No matter how much RAM & CPU you throw at these dogs, they just don't run any better. Gobs of RAM, wasteful use of CPU cycles. A modern desktop dystopia.
> Electron might just be laziness - or inability to really care about the user.
Or it might be that it is just good enough for the target user. My 2013 Macbook has enough power to run all the Electron apps I need without slowing down...well it did once I removed Atom and learned to love Visual Studio Code.
I think that Atom's performance woes and resource hogging tends to be a stand-in for all atom apps.
My laptop is a 2008 MacBook Pro with a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo and 4G RAM. It's perfectly fine for running R Studio, Emacs, Python, Excel, Safari and VirtualBox with 1 or 2 VMs. Yet a trivial Electron app will make it crawl with the fan spinning like a jet about to take off.
In this age of portable devices and the battle to get decent battery life out of your machine, Electron apps strike me as counterproductive. There's more to it then just memory usage, I think.
Ahhhhh yes. When people post claims about it's terrible performance they're concerned about how the computer feels.
/s
No. When it comes down to it. Electron hogs and drains a user's laptop battery, which in turn affects their user experience. How hard is that to understand?
Not everyone has a Macbook with decent battery life. Some people don't like Macs, don't like Apple, or simply can't afford one.
If you program with a concern for perform and battery life, it'll run well on a Mac as well as an old computer.
If you code lazily with Electron, some people will notice: a drop in battery life, and a slowing down of their computer's responsiveness.
It's pretty simple really. Code for the lowest common denominator of your target audience.
I've never noticed Electron apps negatively impacting my computer. I use Slack all the time and I don't notice a difference when I have it running vs when i don't. Do most people not like Electron because the number seems high or does it negatively impact their computer in some way? (I have a MBP with 8 gig RAM, that doesn't seem out of the ordinary)
The only electron app I've ever used that wasn't slow/terrible is VSCode which happens to be written in typescript by Microsoft and it still occasionally decides to use 100% of my macbook's CPU making it entirely unusable until I restart, so I'm not sure that's a very good argument.
As a user I think Electron is great. It means many more apps have a Mac version. Compare to games, where Electron typically isn’t feasible, and observe how many games don’t have a Mac version. A little extra memory usage is fine by me. I can understand how people disagree, and that’s fine, just don’t use Electron apps. No need to ban them from the platform.
> Plus the experience of Electron apps is generally superior lately
Uh, I'm going to hard disagree on that. They take longer to open, they're slower to use, they take up more battery, and they don't behave in a consistent way with the rest of the OS.
I don't think that apps necessarily chose it because of the reasons you mentioned. It is most definitely due to productivity, but there are ways to mitigate the CPU and battery usage -- I often have Spotify open on my Mac and it really doesn't use much CPU (often less than either Safari or Docker), and it doesn't suffer from poor performance most of the time. I would say that while Electron apps, as a whole, are generally worse than a native app, there are ways around the issues that plague some of them that depend on the developer(s). For example, VSCode and Spotify having pretty good performance and not hogging CPU, while Slack and Atom the opposite.
I'm using a 2008 macbook as well and I don't have any huge problems with most apps. I do stay away from web-tech-based apps as much as I can though.
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