Comment by wiseowise
1 day ago
> but it requires shipping an entire web browser
That’s a moot point and completely irrelevant for 99.99% people.
1 day ago
> but it requires shipping an entire web browser
That’s a moot point and completely irrelevant for 99.99% people.
Perhaps that is an accurate percentage, but lawyers are in that .01%. If you're competing with Microsoft Word on performance you'd better be stupid fast and lightweight. Transactional lawyers routinely have dozens of Word documents and PDFs open at a time. Not long-term viable with something like Electron.
Word has the worst performance ever. So I don't think competing with Word on performance should be hard.
Not necessarily. You can have dozens of Word instances open and it still doesn't bog the system down nearly as much as 5 Notions with the Chromium renderer. Word might not seem fast, but it's lightweight enough to work on the crappiest PCs you (or the IT dept) can find.
Isn't word really slow and also implemented as a web browser currently?
Not the version currently used by corporate lawyers, no.
I can't speak to the future, but let's say I hope so!
Word for Windows is fast and native. Word for Mac is slow, but still native.
VS Code, the aforementioned very performant Electron-based IDE, would like to differ
VS Code is very much a special case and not the least bit representative of the typical Electron app. It benefits from having some of the best talent available working on it and has multiple bits that drop down to lower-level solutions to improve performance, both of which Microsoft is willing to pay for because VS Code entrenches them in the software development world in ways it wouldn’t be otherwise.
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I'm not sure I agree it's "very performant", but nonetheless I do love it. (Compare it to Zed, for example.)
In any event, VS code is only required to render text in a single font, with very few layout concerns, styling, run-level formatting, etc. that require re-flowing across multiple of pages, etc. And each of those is text files measuring in the bytes. Tritium, by contrast, has to hold and operate on PDFs and Word documents each with very complicated layout and rendering logic and measuring in the kbs.
People praising VSCode's performance are probably better defined by having too fast computers than anything else, by all measures VSCode really isn't particularly lightweight nor performant.
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