<story><title>Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)</title><url>https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>user5994461</author><text>&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems...&lt;p&gt;Really???&lt;p&gt;Because personally, I keep having performance problems on all laptops I have. Don&amp;#x27;t try running on battery saving mode, seriously.&lt;p&gt;I stop counting the 5+ years old laptops that have to be upgraded, they can&amp;#x27;t watch a youtube full HD video in good conditions.&lt;p&gt;----&lt;p&gt;Fun Anecdote: I had to trial an entreprisey SaaS solution not long ago. A coworker gave me the name and I opened the site on my laptop (on the move outside of work, just taking a quick look).&lt;p&gt;Their site froze my firefox for 30 seconds because these idiots put a high quality full screen video of a surfer in the background of the main page. Looks cool, doesn&amp;#x27;t it? &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.wavefront.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.wavefront.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Couldn&amp;#x27;t see the site. Had to be at work to read it, on my top end workstation, the video played smoothly there. Needless to say, didn&amp;#x27;t take the product seriously.</text></item><item><author>brightball</author><text>The real trick is whether or not users care about:&lt;p&gt;A) This works on all of the platforms that we use&lt;p&gt;vs&lt;p&gt;B) Performance could be better on my computer&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems...which is almost entirely because SSD&amp;#x27;s make them so much less noticeable if you start dipping into swap unless you&amp;#x27;re really working out your machine.&lt;p&gt;For most users, just knowing it will work on their machine is a bigger influence in using the product...and therefore a greater influence on business...than the performance of that system. It&amp;#x27;s especially true with a chat system where the most important feature is that everybody on the team can get access.</text></item><item><author>pdabbadabba</author><text>Well, to the extent that these costs degrade the user experience, I&amp;#x27;m not sure they really are externalizing them. Presumably they pay this cost in the form of decreased user satisfaction. It&amp;#x27;s just that this is a cost they are willing to pay.&lt;p&gt;There may be an interesting economic lesson here: it really is not that easy to externalize costs. It surely can be done (air pollution), but it requires some special circumstances for those costs not to be internalized in a different form. (These special circumstances might include information asymmetries, harm to a public good, enjoyed by people other than a firm&amp;#x27;s own customers, etc.--themselves classic risk factors for market failure.)&lt;p&gt;By the same token, there probably are some truly externalized costs in this example, but I would expect them to be very minor and indirect. For example, most people probably do not pay the &amp;#x27;true&amp;#x27; cost of their electricity. So to the extent electron wastes power, some of the cost will be internalized in the form of user dissatisfaction. But some will also be externalized either because the user doesn&amp;#x27;t know about the extra power consumption, or because the user herself doesn&amp;#x27;t fully internalize the costs of her power consumption and therefore doesn&amp;#x27;t care as much as she might if all costs were properly internalized.</text></item><item><author>Veen</author><text>What you call &amp;quot;trade-offs&amp;quot; appears to me to be developers externalizing their costs onto users. There are costs to developing desktop applications and developers don&amp;#x27;t want to pay them, so they make users pay for them in wasted hardware dollars, bandwidth, RAM, battery life, and poor integration.</text></item><item><author>matthewmacleod</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;nonsense&lt;/i&gt;. Desktop apps have been frequently released since forever.&lt;p&gt;The underlying issue here is that Electron &lt;i&gt;reduces the barrier to entry for cross-platform development&lt;/i&gt;. That is, it&amp;#x27;s cheaper to build a single cross-platform application in Electron than it is to build two or three native applications, and you can re-use your existing web experience. I can completely understand why companies might choose this approach.&lt;p&gt;The trade-off — and there &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; a trade-off — is that Electron applications are &lt;i&gt;shite&lt;/i&gt; in comparison with proper native applications. They fail to integrate with the host platform, they are slow, they hog memory and drink power. It&amp;#x27;s fine to make those trade-offs – in some ways, it&amp;#x27;s better that you can get an application at all than the alternative of &amp;#x27;no support for your platform&amp;#x27;. But let&amp;#x27;s be honest here – there is nothing preventing e.g. Spotify or Slack from building native clients for each platform they support, and I find it difficult to believe that the costs would be prohibitive.</text></item><item><author>anaisbetts</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s the thing. You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? If your answer is &amp;quot;A native Cocoa&amp;#x2F;WPF app&amp;quot;, you are on another planet, the answer is, &amp;quot;It wouldn&amp;#x27;t exist at all&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Nobody&lt;/i&gt; in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there&amp;#x27;s basically zero money in it, and it&amp;#x27;s massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x the cost), and also in finding specialist developers who know these dated technologies. And as for Qt, Qt has existed for &lt;i&gt;over two decades&lt;/i&gt; - if its massive &amp;quot;Beatles walking off the plane&amp;quot; moment hasn&amp;#x27;t happened by then, sorry, it&amp;#x27;s not gonna.&lt;p&gt;But now? People are making all kinds of great new apps, and more often than not, they come out on all three platforms. People are &lt;i&gt;excited&lt;/i&gt; about the Desktop again - Electron is so good it&amp;#x27;s single-handedly revitalizing the platform that 
two of the largest tech companies in the world are behind, yet couldn&amp;#x27;t do.&lt;p&gt;That is a Big Deal.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sha90</author><text>&amp;gt; I stop counting the 5+ years old laptops that have to be upgraded,&lt;p&gt;5+ years ago is that LOOOOOONG time that OP was talking about. It&amp;#x27;s also unfair to compare technical capabilities of old hardware for many reasons. I think the point was that, new hardware, _while its new_, is becoming more and more capable. Any new laptop today, even budget ones, can handle YouTube videos in HD. The problem is that HD today won&amp;#x27;t be the same HD that exists in 5 years (i.e., 4k), and it&amp;#x27;s sensible that a budget laptop today will struggle with the 8k technology that comes out 5 years from now. This is an old problem (pun intended) and should not be surprising.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Because personally, I keep having performance problems on all laptops I have.&lt;p&gt;Selection bias. Programmers who compile code, run VMs or containers, and process tons of data, are not the average consumer laptop use case and have much stricter requirements. Many people are sitting in Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, or Google Docs for most of their day-- and likely inside of Chrome.&lt;p&gt;Where are the &amp;quot;Chrome is Flash for the desktop&amp;quot; posts?&lt;p&gt;The idea that Electron is any different of a user experience for the vast majority of users seems skewed to developer usage, to me.</text></comment>
<story><title>Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)</title><url>https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>user5994461</author><text>&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems...&lt;p&gt;Really???&lt;p&gt;Because personally, I keep having performance problems on all laptops I have. Don&amp;#x27;t try running on battery saving mode, seriously.&lt;p&gt;I stop counting the 5+ years old laptops that have to be upgraded, they can&amp;#x27;t watch a youtube full HD video in good conditions.&lt;p&gt;----&lt;p&gt;Fun Anecdote: I had to trial an entreprisey SaaS solution not long ago. A coworker gave me the name and I opened the site on my laptop (on the move outside of work, just taking a quick look).&lt;p&gt;Their site froze my firefox for 30 seconds because these idiots put a high quality full screen video of a surfer in the background of the main page. Looks cool, doesn&amp;#x27;t it? &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.wavefront.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.wavefront.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Couldn&amp;#x27;t see the site. Had to be at work to read it, on my top end workstation, the video played smoothly there. Needless to say, didn&amp;#x27;t take the product seriously.</text></item><item><author>brightball</author><text>The real trick is whether or not users care about:&lt;p&gt;A) This works on all of the platforms that we use&lt;p&gt;vs&lt;p&gt;B) Performance could be better on my computer&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems...which is almost entirely because SSD&amp;#x27;s make them so much less noticeable if you start dipping into swap unless you&amp;#x27;re really working out your machine.&lt;p&gt;For most users, just knowing it will work on their machine is a bigger influence in using the product...and therefore a greater influence on business...than the performance of that system. It&amp;#x27;s especially true with a chat system where the most important feature is that everybody on the team can get access.</text></item><item><author>pdabbadabba</author><text>Well, to the extent that these costs degrade the user experience, I&amp;#x27;m not sure they really are externalizing them. Presumably they pay this cost in the form of decreased user satisfaction. It&amp;#x27;s just that this is a cost they are willing to pay.&lt;p&gt;There may be an interesting economic lesson here: it really is not that easy to externalize costs. It surely can be done (air pollution), but it requires some special circumstances for those costs not to be internalized in a different form. (These special circumstances might include information asymmetries, harm to a public good, enjoyed by people other than a firm&amp;#x27;s own customers, etc.--themselves classic risk factors for market failure.)&lt;p&gt;By the same token, there probably are some truly externalized costs in this example, but I would expect them to be very minor and indirect. For example, most people probably do not pay the &amp;#x27;true&amp;#x27; cost of their electricity. So to the extent electron wastes power, some of the cost will be internalized in the form of user dissatisfaction. But some will also be externalized either because the user doesn&amp;#x27;t know about the extra power consumption, or because the user herself doesn&amp;#x27;t fully internalize the costs of her power consumption and therefore doesn&amp;#x27;t care as much as she might if all costs were properly internalized.</text></item><item><author>Veen</author><text>What you call &amp;quot;trade-offs&amp;quot; appears to me to be developers externalizing their costs onto users. There are costs to developing desktop applications and developers don&amp;#x27;t want to pay them, so they make users pay for them in wasted hardware dollars, bandwidth, RAM, battery life, and poor integration.</text></item><item><author>matthewmacleod</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;nonsense&lt;/i&gt;. Desktop apps have been frequently released since forever.&lt;p&gt;The underlying issue here is that Electron &lt;i&gt;reduces the barrier to entry for cross-platform development&lt;/i&gt;. That is, it&amp;#x27;s cheaper to build a single cross-platform application in Electron than it is to build two or three native applications, and you can re-use your existing web experience. I can completely understand why companies might choose this approach.&lt;p&gt;The trade-off — and there &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; a trade-off — is that Electron applications are &lt;i&gt;shite&lt;/i&gt; in comparison with proper native applications. They fail to integrate with the host platform, they are slow, they hog memory and drink power. It&amp;#x27;s fine to make those trade-offs – in some ways, it&amp;#x27;s better that you can get an application at all than the alternative of &amp;#x27;no support for your platform&amp;#x27;. But let&amp;#x27;s be honest here – there is nothing preventing e.g. Spotify or Slack from building native clients for each platform they support, and I find it difficult to believe that the costs would be prohibitive.</text></item><item><author>anaisbetts</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s the thing. You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? If your answer is &amp;quot;A native Cocoa&amp;#x2F;WPF app&amp;quot;, you are on another planet, the answer is, &amp;quot;It wouldn&amp;#x27;t exist at all&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Nobody&lt;/i&gt; in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there&amp;#x27;s basically zero money in it, and it&amp;#x27;s massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x the cost), and also in finding specialist developers who know these dated technologies. And as for Qt, Qt has existed for &lt;i&gt;over two decades&lt;/i&gt; - if its massive &amp;quot;Beatles walking off the plane&amp;quot; moment hasn&amp;#x27;t happened by then, sorry, it&amp;#x27;s not gonna.&lt;p&gt;But now? People are making all kinds of great new apps, and more often than not, they come out on all three platforms. People are &lt;i&gt;excited&lt;/i&gt; about the Desktop again - Electron is so good it&amp;#x27;s single-handedly revitalizing the platform that 
two of the largest tech companies in the world are behind, yet couldn&amp;#x27;t do.&lt;p&gt;That is a Big Deal.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baddox</author><text>Different people have vastly different use cases. I haven&amp;#x27;t experienced a performance issue with desktop Slack or any other (non-game) application for many years. Sure, if I look at how much RAM Slack is using I&amp;#x27;d probably conclude that it&amp;#x27;s more than it needs to be, but I haven&amp;#x27;t had an issue with RAM usage for, gee, probably ten years.&lt;p&gt;As for battery, again, my laptop battery has been little more than a UPS for at least five years.</text></comment>