Comment by divan
7 days ago
> still dont understand Electron is vastly superior technology
in what sense crossplatoform desktop-wrapper around typesetting engine is a 'vastly superior technology' to native UI frameworks?
7 days ago
> still dont understand Electron is vastly superior technology
in what sense crossplatoform desktop-wrapper around typesetting engine is a 'vastly superior technology' to native UI frameworks?
In the sense that typesetting and text is the rabbit hole that is 90% of UI effort. Native UI frameworks don't bother fixing the real hard problems, they focus on "widgets" instead.
(Not that the web stack is a good solution to this, but at least they're making an effort and they understand the difficult issues.)
> Native UI frameworks don't bother fixing the real hard problems
I'm genuinely curious what do you mean by that.
My beef with web stack was exactly this - typesetting engine from 80s has been never designed for modern UI/UX needs, and it cannot adequately provide those. Whenever I interact with web apps, I experience so many glitches, weird interaction issues (especially if there is a zoom/selection/scrool involved), that I don't even pay attention to them anymore - it's a norm. It's a norm on web to 'just refresh page' (which is equivalent to 'restart native app') - we do it all the time, because absolute majority of web apps is just crap that requires extremely advanced team of web developers to make it a 'baseline' native-like experience level of quality.
I mean if we wanted a good UI/UX framework we'd have to start from typesetting, not add it later as an afterthought to our button and text area widgets.
2 replies →
One is that it solves all problems once instead of various times in various levels of quality on various types of systems. Windows, GTK, Qt, FLTK, [100 others].. not to mention most "native UI framework" delegate to the underlying OS so they don't "solve" anything.
Electron is not a novel approach or "technology" of achieving cross-platform UI. It's literally a Chromium browser plus a Node.js runtime, using web-stack to impersonate desktop application. None of these tools have been designed to solve UI pain points.
Closest thing to what you're describing is Flutter, which is a UI framework designed from ground up for modern UI app needs, without delegating much to OS level.