Comment by jarek-foksa
11 hours ago
Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app to be reported in the past 10 years.
You will be outcompeted if you waste your time reinventing the wheel and optimizing for stuff that doesn't matter. There is some market for highly optimized apps like e.g. Sublime Text, but you can clearly see that the companies behind them are struggling.
> Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app to be reported in the past 10 years.
Nothing is worse than reading something like this. A good software developer cares. It’s wrong to assume customers don't care simply because they don't know what's going on under the hood. Considering the downsides and the resulting side effects (latency, more CPU and RAM consumption, fans spinning etc.), they definitely do care. For example, Microsoft has been using React components in their UI, thinking customers wouldn’t care, but as we have been seeing lately, they do care.
>Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app to be reported in the past 10 years.
I see complains about RAM and slugginess against Slack and countless others Electron apps every fucking day, same as with Adobe forcing web rendered UI parts in Photoshop, and other such cases. Forums are full of them, colleagues always complain about it.
Of course they complain about them, but those are the users, not the purchasers.
How are Adobe and Slack/Salesforce doing?
Are they hurting for customers?
the people that USE the software the most are not the people BUYING the software. it’s why all enterprise software has trash UX.
do you think i as a software engineer like using Jira? Outlook? etc? Heck even the trendy stuff is broken. Anthropic took took 6 months to fix a flickering claude code. -_-
McDonald’s isn’t hurting for customers either. Doesn’t mean their food is anything a chef ought to aspire to.
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Not seeing complaints doesn't mean they don't exist. Not to mention ui latency that is common in electron apps that is just a low-level constant annoyance.
That just means your feedback system is trash if it fails to surface such an obvious and common pain point in user experience. Tough that's an extremely common state of feedback systems. But also, the general computer knowledge isn't that high for every end user to connect some sluggishness in another app to your app wasting ram and causing disk swaps, that eliminates a lot of end user complaints
> reinventing the wheel
what exactly are you inventing by using a framework "invented" decades ago and used by countless apps in all those years?
I have complained about literally every Electron based app I have ever used. How would you know there are no complaints?
There are complaints and then users keep using these super popular and bloated apps. Techies make it seem like bloat is a capital sin but it isn't.
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I don’t complain about Electron because I didn’t install the app if I could avoid it.
> I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app to be reported in the past 10 years.
When was the last time complaining about this did anything?
Even with SublimeText, most popular IDE is VSCode, most popular interface design tool Figma, all popular chat platforms and so on are all electron based. If people were desperate for faster platforms they'll be migrating to them.
> Even with SublimeText, most popular IDE is VSCode
What a weird comparison, one is free, another one is a premium app, of course a lot of people prefer some suffering over paying money
Your mistaking supply-side path dependent outcomes that produce a lack of consumer choice with consumer preference. No consumer prefers slow, bloated, non-native software, but they're stuck with what they can get.
There is competition for Figma. Sketch.
There's plenty of competition for VSCode too.
Don't forget that these Electron apps outcompeted native apps. Figma and VSCode were underdogs to native apps at one point. This is why your supply side argument doesn't make any sense.
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They don’t care, or they don’t know? What they do know is their computer that’s only 5 years old goes to shit with only a few apps open. Time for a new laptop.
Thanks for contributing to the obsolescence cycle.
Do a search for "Microsoft teams slow crash" and you'll find a billion complaints by normies.
They're only doing well because of their illegal monopolistic practices not being cracked down on.
The various GPU-accelerated terminal projects always make me chuckle
Not sure why, terminals are literally GPU accelerated text rendering solutions since the very beginning of rendering text
> Customers simply don't care.
They do, but they don't know what's causing it. 8GB of RAM usage for Codex App is clown-level ridiculous.
I don't bother complaining about Electron-based applications to the developer, and I expect that's not an unusual position. It's not like the downsides are hidden, unique, or a surprise, and if the developers' priorities aligned with ours, they wouldn't have picked electron in the first place.
I use web-tech apps because I have to, and because they're adequate, not because it's an optimal user experience.
I care. I refuse to use Electron slop unless it is literally the only option available (usually due to some proprietary locked-in platform eg Discord). I will happily pay significant sums of money for well-made native apps that often have fewer features than the Electron versions, simply for the pleasure of using tools that integrate seamlessly with my operating system. Not all of us have given up on software quality.
> Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about microplastics in the past 10 years.
> You will be outcompeted if you waste your time reinventing the wheel and optimizing for stuff that doesn't matter. There is some market for safe, environmentally-friendly products, but you can clearly see that the companies that make them are struggling.
ok.