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Electron and the Decline of Native Apps (daringfireball.net)
SwiftOnSecurity, regarding Microsoft's switch to Chromium as Windows's built-in rendering engine: This isn't about Chrome. This is about ElectronJS. Microsoft thinks EdgeHTML cannot get to drop-in feature-parity with Chromium to replace it in Electron apps, whose duplication is becoming a significant performance drain. They want to single-instance Electron with their own fork. Electron is a cancer murdering both macOS and Windows as it proliferates. Microsoft must offer a drop-in version with native optimizations to improve performance and resource utilization. This is the end of desktop applications. There's nowhere but JavaScript.
John Gruber of DaringFireball: I don't share the depth of their pessimism regarding native apps, but Electron is without question a scourge. I think the Mac will prove more resilient than Windows, because the Mac is the platform that attracts people who care. But I worry. In some ways, the worst thing that ever happened to the Mac is that it got so much more popular a decade ago. In theory, that should have been nothing but good news for the platform -- more users means more attention from developers. The more Mac users there are, the more Mac apps we should see.
The problem is, the users who really care about good native apps -- users who know HIG violations when they see them, who care about performance, who care about Mac apps being right -- were mostly already on the Mac. A lot of newer Mac users either don't know or don't care about what makes for a good Mac app.
The problem is, the users who really care about good native apps -- users who know HIG violations when they see them, who care about performance, who care about Mac apps being right -- were mostly already on the Mac. A lot of newer Mac users either don't know or don't care about what makes for a good Mac app.
I feel like I just walked in on a conversation between two people about a topic I care nothing about. Should I care, or maybe do I already care? Possibly, but I have no idea what they're talking about to know.
Better known as 318230.
It's inevitable. As the open runtime of the web becomes better and better, it will take over everything else. MSIE, Real video, ActiveX, Flash, they all died because of this unstoppable train. And everything else will die too, including all native apps. Native apps used to have a performance edge, but that pretty much only remains for hard realtime stuff and it's just a matter of time before this web runtime takes that over too. It's a pity we ended up with JavaScript, but it's still a million times better than writing your app twice only to have it run on a fraction of platforms. The last major hurdle we need to take, are the platform specific app stores that still provide their owners with a reason to keep favoring their platform specific solutions over a more open approach, but eventually those will die too. It's inevitable.
0x or or snor perron?!
You mean like the fucking idiots who don't put the cancel button on the left like they should?
#DeleteFacebook
No, some time around 10.3 Apple forgot what made for a good Mac app. They went for skeuomorphism where it wasn't useful, per-window brushed metal appearance, non-standard UI widgets all over the place, etc. They deprecated actual useful UI features like drawers, and violated their own guidelines left, right and centre. Then they decided they needed to remove "Save As..." at some point, only to bring it back later with different behaviour (making it save at the old location before also saving at the new location).
Sure I dislike apps that don't feel right. I never liked how Qt applications always felt not-quite-native on OSX, and the same with Firefox where menus don't quite feel right because they aren't native. I dislike the situation Linux inherited from UNIX where every UI toolkit has a different look-and-feel so it varies from app to app. Microsoft is a big mess, too. It's probably best demonstrated with settings, where you have classic control panels that open in their own windows and behave like regular Win32 apps, sort of web-like control panels that open in the "All Control Panels" window and can be navigated with back/forward buttons, MMC snapins inherited from WinNT and things that mimic that approach, and then the flat-look touch-optimised Metro-style settings. Nothing's unified at all.
The OS vendors/distributors themselves aren't providing coherent, unified UI language, so how do you expect third-party app developers do do so? Everyone's bundling frameworks with apps now since Apple made it the trendy thing to do (just include the frameworks inside the app bundle), Microsoft made it easy (use WinSxS so you can have per-app versions of DLLs), and the Linux distros jumped on the bandwagon (Flatpak? Snap). Electron may be a particularly heavy-weight framework, but it's definitely not the only one that gets bundled with applications. But this has lead to a vicious cycle where apps bundle frameworks to avoid incompatibilities, so the frameworks are emboldened to make incompatible changes on minor releases, necessitating the bundling. It isn't an option to use a system-wide installation of a lot of frameworks, because they don't maintain compatibility.
Even if MS manages to make a single system-wide instance of Chromium for running Electron apps, it's not going to solve bloat issues with duplication of the JavaScript frameworks used by the apps themselves. You can't use a single instance of them because of incompatibility between versions, and the fact that JavaScript lets you inject members into any object. You'll still have the bloat of loading, JIT-compiling and caching the JavaScript frameworks for every app.
The trouble is, we've reinvented Java but it's worse in almost every way. We're running JIT-compiled code from untrusted sources on a sprawling runtime with vulnerabilities discovered regularly. But now every app also pulls in a huge pile of dependencies, bloating it further, and greatly increasing the number of third parties you need to trust when you run the code. I don't see how this is any better.
Discord (desktop version), Slack (desktop version), Skype (desktop version), and Visual Studio Code are all made with Electron. But the differences between Discord (desktop version) and Discordapp.com are quite minor: the option to let others know what game you are playing at the moment, system-wide push-to-talk in voice channels, and video chat capability.
People are coming up with all sorts of contorted logic about the switch when there is an easy answer - it costs a lot of money to write and maintain a browser engine. So why not re-use the open source one that has the widest usage at a fraction of the cost.
I'm not an Apple user anymore, but I completely feel that Electron is the software engineering equivalent of flinging poo.
Let's just look at the minimum requirements to run Atom, an Electron-based text editor with IDE extensions
Processor - 1.8 GHz or higher Pentium 4 (or equivalent)
Memory - 2 GB RAM (minimum 1 GB dedicated to Atom, Molecule node, or Cloud Molecule)
Hard disk - 50 MB for run-time and configuration, 10 GB for data archiving
Are you freaking kidding me? For a text editor? I don't care how much bling it has, that's inexcusable. All this engineering we've done, all the rare earths we've mined, all the research on battery life has to go down the toilet because we're sending Javascript developers to do a systems programmer's job? My phone's battery has to go to shit for Slack, and my laptop has to overheat and stay on a power cord for Atom?
That's freaking irresponsible. There's little these apps do that vim and emacs and IRC haven't done for decades for a tiny percentage of these requirements.
Cross-platform development has been done way better than this already. but the training wheel languages have got to go.
Uh...what part of "-style chat interface" did you not get? They didn't say it was IRC full stop, they said it's a chat interface in a similar style to IRC. Does storage and forwarding of messages and files while you're offline require a full web client and server packaged together as client software? Does voice chat? Does a membership and permissions system require that? None of what you're saying addresses the complaint being made regarding extreme resource usage for relatively simple software.
Remember that Skype supported chat, voice, and offline messaging even in the mid-2000s. It was built to work even on old Windows 2000 machines and in 2005 when even cheaper new machines were shipping with 512MB standard, it required that the machine have a minimum of 128MB of RAM for Skype plus the entire OS and other running software. Meanwhile, the post you responded to complained about multiple GB of RAM used by Slack a single application that doesn't do very much more than Skype from 2005 did and offers a proprietary system only instead of a universal standard like IRC or XMPP.
A number of the website that I have used for a long time seem to recently have taken a HUGE turn for the worse when they unveiled new "app-ified" look and feel and operational flows. These are not widely-used sites, things like the tee-time scheduler at my favorite golf course and the portal site my employers contract with for unified benefits access.
These sites used to be pretty well done, and even as a professional software developer (albeit one who mostly does radar signal processor development) I had few complaints. But over the last year or so, all these sites trashed their old implementations for new ones that look like they've been slapped together by tweens on crack who's only test platform is an iPhone. It may look fine on a phone to have 20mm by 20mm buttons to touch, but those huge buttons mean nothing to my desktop. Having to run through 15 different "next" screens because you can only fit just so many 20mm x 20mm buttons on a phone screen and still present any meaningful information or functions is NOT an improvement when I've got three 27-inch monitors hooked to my desktop.
And it's pretty clear none of the developers have actually USED these appy-apps, even on their phones because they just freaking don't work. For example, the legacy golf course website let you setup "buddy lists" so if you were reserving a foursome (or 2), you could just click 3 or 7 buddies from the list and bam you're done. The new appy-app preserved the buddy list, but it takes two clicks to access, and you can select one and only one buddy per access...each time to click a buddy he is added, but you're also dropped immediately back to the top menu and and you have to continue and make those multiple click for each person. If any of them had ever used the app, they'd realize immediately that "hmm, maybe we can allow multiple selections here before dropping back"...but they didn't have any more room for yet another 20mm x 20mm button...
I don't know who those people are, nor do I care who they are or what their opinions are. IRC sucks and always has. An assertion of "inferior" always seems to be missing important parts of the assertion: to whom, for what purposes? Forums and mailing lists are objectively better than any chat application for situations where clearly thought out and sometimes very detailed responses that can be skimmed at the reader's leisure are desirable. I can subscribe to a mailing list or read a forum without a site-specific account; I can't do that with proprietary IRC on steroids clients like Slack and Discord. If I need to discuss in near real-time, chat makes a lot more sense and mailing lists and forums are unnecessarily slow and frustrating.
Microsoft centralized Skype for data siphoning and control; everything else is a side effect. Skype has also been absolute trash ever since they did so. P2P Skype worked just fine when both people were behind NATs; it's called UDP hole punching and it is quite effective for the type of NAT that is in widespread use in homes and small businesses. I'd hardly call Electron a native application; if anything, it's more of an elaborate emulator.
So you ship a web browser, and a client, and application logic and call it an "app"?
Yes, but it's not as performant as you make it sound...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley