The strong point of Electron is easy _cross-platform_ application development and packaging (spits out .exe, .app and Linux binary), with no further dependencies. Ever tried packaging a QT application for Mac, Windows and Linux? I can tell you it's a painful experience, one I don't want to repeat.
Also HTML+CSS allows for extremely versatile styling and fine-grained control of appearance.
as someone who has done both desktop apps and electron apps, it is much faster to write some html/css and wrap it in electron than to do the same in qt/gtk/etc...
Not to mention, the HTML/CSS combo is possibly the best we've come up with for designing user interfaces.
Have you seen the things people have built with Electron? I wouldn't underestimate the capabilities of HTML/CSS/JS for desktop apps when you have projects like Slack, Atom, Visual Studio Code, GitKraken, the Brave browser, etc. all using Electron to build their desktop apps.
I truly believe that the success of Electron is not limited to only being cross-platform. It is a very compelling motivation, really. But I think one of the key aspects is that the HTML/CSS/JS ecosystem is so huge for building UIs that is a lot simpler than to rely on the classic UI desktop frameworks
Advantage of using Electron is that you have easy to deploy web version as well as easy build / install / update process for Linux users (though less native).
Qt is amazing due to much smaller memory footprint, but cross platform builds, packaging and CI still gonna take a lot more effort to maintain.
As much as people like to shit on electron, I rather have an electron app than no app when it comes to cross-platform compatibility and features.
The reason why Electron is so successful is because the other UI frameworks simply don't solve the problems people have as elegantly. Doing "custom" UI elements is super easy with CSS and there are many many developers for that, while doing so with WPF or QT requires far more skill and is a lot more quirky.
There's plenty of cross-platform UI kits for a wide range of languages.
The thing that's big about Electron is it allows web developers to use their existing skills to create desktop apps.
A lot of web developers would like to make desktop apps, but aren't willing to learn a new systems language to do that, especially when there's a solution that lets them use the JS + HTML + CSS they already know.
All your positives about Qt can be applied to electron but even better. From a business point of view electron is a winner. For example at our company we have built a desktop app, web app, salesforce plugin, chrome extension, outlook plugin, cli app, and are working on mobile apps all using one JavaScript codebase. It’s a business and developers dream.
There really is no competition and any claim to the contrary would need to offer more than a cross platform desktop app.
It's much easier to provide a cross-platform rich UI experience with Electron/Atom. It's probably also easier to leverage existing developer skill sets (HTML, JS, CSS, etc.)
I want to use html/css/js to create my front-end, Although it is more resource intensive then Qt, it is simply more flexible and has a much richer eco-system to rely on.
Meanwhile the usage of chrome as a run-time is one of the worst parts of electron as every app consumes a lot more memory than a "native" application would need. These days Chrome is so highly sophisticated by now you could easily call it an OS. It comes with a lot of baggage from a Driverstack for Sound, Joysticks and Accelerometers to a whole suite of debugging tools.
Don't get me wrong. Electron is good for what it is: a way to easily write portable apps which can share codebase with a SaaS-Platforms. I would just wish developers would have just taken a different approach e.g. using a more striped down version of chrome or maybe even use Firefox/Servo.
Electron isn't great just because it runs javascript, it's great because you get to use the HTML/CSS you're used to making pretty UIs with to make pretty desktop UIs. HTML/CSS have their warts, but they're a fantastically efficient way to build out UIs.
In general I like Electron, it makes it easy for web developers like me to get into making desktop apps. However, if you're not building it cross-platform, what's the benefit of Electron? If you disregard easy for web-developers.
For naysayers, Electron only has to support one browser flavor and one version, which eliminates one of the biggest disadvantages of building Web based apps. With Electron and similarly with nw.js, the performance can be close to par with native apps without the cross compilation issues of native c++ frameworks like Qt. And with Electron, if you want to write some native code in C/C++, you can integrate that also. The only downsides I see is protecting closed source code and the lack of Mobile support, which is not coming any time soon due to Apple blocking Google V8 engine from their platform due to V8's use of JIT compilation.
There isn't anything about Electron that I feel it is simple over Delphi, WinForms, JavaFX, Android, Cocoa, Qt, XAML, other than being easier for those that grew with HTML/CSS.
I'm wondering if part of the push to those electron apps is because more young developers know how to use HTML/CSS and JavaScript than there are people who know how to use GDI+, Qt, and so on. Maybe cross-platform support is actually an afterthought.
Equating electron and cross platform is a gigantic fallacy.
Qt and other GUI frameworks (like Juce and FLTK) exist and are blisteringly fast. You don't have to package an entire web browser to make something cross platform.
Also HTML+CSS allows for extremely versatile styling and fine-grained control of appearance.
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