Comment by mythz
5 years ago
Maybe try elaborating yourself? The constant criticism of Electron Apps is that they're bloated and slow, you're claiming otherwise but missed the part providing any presumption of evidence to the contrary.
I've yet to experience any Electron App that's close to the snappiness and UX of the original native Spotify client, I'd like to hear about good examples of Electron Apps comparable to it.
Electron adds no more overhead than Chrome does. Any snappy web app can be packaged as an Electron app and be equally snappy. So if there are no snappy Electron apps it's because of the web, not Electron.
> So if there are no snappy Electron apps it's because of the web, not Electron.
That is, indeed, the argument, except without the "if" part.
The web is filled with bloated and slow web applications. This is nothing new. Electron is taking the fall for existing on a popular platform that lots of fast moving companies are using and unfortunately gumming up with feature creep and poor architectural design.
I don’t care to share details of my past employers but I have absolutely worked on web apps that ran 60 Hz on mobile and looked beautiful to boot.
It was a team of senior devs though, and it was a small shop. We didn’t suffer from the same organizational issues at the time but as we grew, sure enough - the web application slowed as the need to move quickly and cut corners arose.
The point is that the web offers you a vast array of performance footguns that anyone on a tight schedule is going to wind up firing off at one time or another. Electron isn’t to blame. It’s architecture and code practices.
But the web is easy to hate, and by association Electron is going to take a ton of flack.
Right, so still no evidence despite continuing to claim otherwise. Lets start off easy, what's the best example of a publicly downloadable Electron App that has the snappiest UX?
Having experienced the original Spotify App myself and having used many Electron Apps daily for years I'd posit that it's naive to claim the responsiveness and snappiness of the original Spotify App could ever be reimplemented in Electron. You're claiming it is, so lets hear about some examples we can actually use?
No evidence? I have no obligation to hold your hand.
I’ve worked in the industry for something on the order of like 15 years and have worked on extremely snappy web apps that I don’t personally care to name given my association with them.
I’m sorry you are disappointed by the web. I actually find VSCode to be an impressive achievement with Electron, though, fwiw - which is probably not much given your obvious predisposition.
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It doesn't matter if that rotating loading indicator icon is rendered at 120hz or how fancy the boot animation is presenting latest commodities of the company shop...
When I open a software, I did so for a purpose, and I expect to actually do the thing as fast as possible and be done with UI...that's the reason why TUI apps are popular with power-users
That’s not what I mean when I say 60 Hz. I’m referring to performance navigating about the app. There was a small startup latency to populate the store but it was smooth sailing after that. Even that you could probably optimize out today with a talented team given all the new PWA tech.
I will say though that I’ve yet to work anywhere else that held themselves to a comparable performance standard.
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Web technologies are default-slow while native (except Java on Android) is typically default-fast. One needs to go out of their way to create a slow native app, even if it's of course possible.
Slowness is the natural state of web applications and creating a fast web application is much more difficult and requires a senior team with knowledge about browser implementation in order to avoid or work around the performance pitfalls.
I also have the feeling that such performance comparisons are done with the assumption that the apps under test are almost the only thing running on the machine. If every applications were to start 10 processes taking 1 GB of RAM things would get uncomfortably slow.
> native (except Java on Android) is typically default-fast
Is anything fast on Android? I have a 2017 Samsung and it's always been slow.
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