Aaaand it’s electron garbage.
It’s basically Chrome. It’s not a real application, it’s a website pretending to be one. It uses a metric fuckton of RAM and eats your battery faster than Prince Andrew a minor.
If Firefox could allow their engine to be packaged like this I’d use it. The problem I see here is chromium. Everything is a trade off and we need more ways to build maintainable cross platform applications.
Slack, for example, is Electron and it runs great. One of the best apps I’ve used. And it works better than the browser version…
The hate on Lemmy of electron is a bit of an overreaction if you ask me. Yeah it uses more ram than is necessary but again everything is a trade off. Not everything can be a hard to maintain rust app. Let’s try to embrace cross platform solutions, though yes fuck chrome/google, so sure criticize that part of it.
Each electron App is actually a full independent chromium browser install running a website. It’s easy to code for and works cross platform as a result, but it’s essentially just a website, although they can run offline depending on what’s been built in to the local app.
Each electron app running on your system is a separate full chromium app running, with no sharing of resources between each instance. So they take up a lot of space each and duplicate all the resource usage, and potentially the security flaws.
Slack desktop app is built with electron and works much better than the web app in my experience. So no it’s not actually always that simple.
It’s what you deploy to your users if you want to work around ad blockers and browser extensions. It’s a great tool to get operating system level access to exfiltrate information about your users and identify them uniquely, even if they would prefer that not to happen.
All that with the help of Google’s telemetry engine aka Chrome, which further helps Alphabet to manifest their interpretation of web standards in the world.
We worked to move things onto the web. Now people bring the web back to your desktop with every application bringing it’s own browser shell. We have come full circle and we’re now using 10x the resources.
Electron is the prime example of everything that is wrong in IT.
Wow. That sounds horrible. Do you have a source about the system level access statement? I would like to see people’s thoughts on it, if it’s as bad as it sounds, I’m surprised I haven’t heard about it before
There are other options like Tauri that do the same thing as electron, but instead of bundling chromium with the app, it relies on the OS provided web view. It’s also built with Rust, which tends to be faster.
As an example, Mac would use Safari, Windows would use Edge (chromium), and Linux would likely use WebKitGTK, which is what safari uses.
By using the default browser, developers save a ton of space—at the risk of compatibility issues, which are very very rare nowadays.
WebKitGTK is only native for GTK desktops. On Qt desktops, you’d want QtWebEngine instead.
Electron runs a core Chromium Browser + NodeJS + a bit more.
Unlike Chromium itself it is not backwards compatible and removes a ton of things like its sandboxing capabilities.
I am not sure how it is less secure, but it may use more RAM (also not always but generally yes of course), doesnt allow hardening (unlike android WebView apps) and breaks LD_PRELOAD-ing another memory allocator.
This is only a big problem in special cases, in general it makes apps strictly dependend on GNU glibc and others, no idea how it works on Alpine or others (that actually try to make a secure system).
If somebody knows more about security concerns about Electron, please add.
Ugh, I was looking forward to replacing Thunderbird/Bridge, but never mind.
Yeah, Proton is awesome, that’s for sure. Now, being a “security and privacy” company, it blows my mind that they put so much effort on making apps for Windows and Mac first, leaving Linux behind, and when they finally get to it, they just dump in a glorified PWA. This world is really weird 🤣🤣
And that they decided to go with RPM and DEB instead of just doing a Flatpak
I prefer rpm over flatpak. at least I know any os dependency updates are happening regularly, flatpak may not get weekly dependency updates from proton
Its kinda annoying for anyone not on debian or fedora (and derivatives) though.
it blows my mind that they put so much effort on making apps for Windows and Mac first, leaving Linux behind
Because most people use Windows and Mac, including their clients. It’s not the world that is weird, it’s people who don’t understand such basic things. You don’t focus on 5% of your users.
I don’t use either OS, but the apps are .DMG (Mac) and .exe (Windows), so I believe they are, yes.
They mutually imply one another.
If something was private, but not secure, well, that implies there are ways to breach the privacy, which isn’t very private at all.
If it’s secure, but not private, that implies it’s readable by someone other than the consenting conversational parties, which makes it insecure.
Companies have to comply with law enforcement. If anything, the little amount of data they were able to give after being forced is a good proof of their overall claim. If there is someone to blame here are courts using antiterrorism laws to catch environmental activists.
I mean, if you want secure/private communication, email should not be your go-to. It’s a horrible platform by today’s standards. It was never designed to have any serious level of security. Once they have an unencrypted email on the target with timestamps and mail headers, all they need to do is see who was communicating with Proton at that point. I don’t know if anything has changed since the PRISM days, but back in the 2000s, they definitely had that level of insight into the web.
Not much has changed. It’s really only secure if you are sending emails between addresses within the same local network like gmail to gmail. Thankfull with end to end encryption it can be pretty safe just good luck finding someone that knows how to use it. but thankfully proton makes that pretty seamless.
That’s why I put “security and privacy” between quotes. I have absolutely Jo way to confirm if they are secure and private or if they’re not, other than all the contradicting mentions all over the internet. Also, while security and privacy may not be mutually dependent in the physical world, it stands to reason that something insecure cannot be private, and something not private is inherently insecure, as @pixelscript@lemmy.ml clearly pointed out. As for controlling my own email infrastructure, I’d love to, as everything else I do self-host, and only with FOSS software. However, email hosting is a seriously complicated animal that requires too much effort and maintenance, and most of us dont have the knowledge and time to invest in that, so compromises need to be made. I am well aware that there’s always risk on using something I have no real control over, but the alternative meets the reason for the phrase “the treatment is worse than the decease”.
“Finally” really is the key word, waiting for Proton to add features or apps is painful at times.
Glad they’ve finally made progress with this.
Its just a webview app…
Yep. Installed it, started it, saw it is basically the website in an embedded browser, uninstalled it.
Like, come on, you have a web version. Why should I use an extra application to view a website. This seems like a cheap excuse for a desktop app.
Speaking of mail apps, has anyone used Thunderbird recently? I had used it for a year or two up until . . . a year or two ago (probably two or three, actually) and then switched to kmail to satisfy my masochism. Thunderbird just hadn’t been doing it for me with meh functionality and slightly more meh looks.
Fast forward to yesterday when I’m updating my steamdeck desktop to use nix stuff instead of rwfus+pacman and I couldn’t get kmail from nix to behave right so I thought I’d give thunderbird another look. I’m several hours into tinkering with it and holy hell has it changed pretty much completely from a few years ago. Looks fantastic and works pretty much exactly how I want/expect it to. Good job mozilla!
Thunderbird is fine.
Tbh I have no idea what they are doing though, they have more funding than GNOME but after Supernova I didnt see any updates.
See my list of flatpak repositories
There is an unofficial Thunderbird nightly Flatpak, that will likely reveal what the hell they are doing.
So Supernova is kinda nice, mainly a big overhaul of the underlying stuff, making it easier to maintain.
It lacks a ton of things like Threads (the addon TB Conversation works though). Also their “spaces” bar is useless, as it just opens tabs, so it is redundant. Good idea, but only if it could replace tabs.
Their search and filter stuff is still the same, really bad. Either displaced in the message list column, as the global search still opens a new tab which is kinda bad UI.
Some addons broke too, not a big deal though.
I have the feeling they removed nested filters, which is extremely bad, but filters still work.
Thunderbird works well.
I believe I read somewhere they’re focusing heavily on the mobile app at the moment (or rather turning K-9 into their mobile app). Once they get that out, we’ll see where the desktop goes.
I’ve never found Thunderbird search bad compared to alternatives, as long as I’m not looking to find content inside attachments. Really fast and responsive and being a desktop client without paginated results makes moving and deleting in bulk so much easier. Would love it to be as powerful as Voidtools Everything to get a bit more granular sometimes but otherwise pretty happy with it.
Just started using Thunderbird again a couple of months ago. Like it! I never really stopped liking it, just stopped using it because all the webmail interfaces and “appification”.
Was just trying to get K-9 Mail working on my phone again (after years of using umpteen different apps) and it’s not as smooth as I remember.
I think they’re talking Kmail from the KDE app suite. I thought they meant K-9 mail.
Btw If I remember correctly K-9 mail is or is becoming Thunderbird.
Good job mozilla!
Mozilla don’t work on Thunderbird any more. It’s an independent project now. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-faq#w_who-makes-thunderbird
If you like Thunderbird, I recommend checking out Betterbird fork as well that adds more features.
It’s not developed by mozilla anymore. they stopped updating it a couple years ago.
Not from mozilla, they spun it off a couple years ago
“Thunderbird is completely independent of the Mozilla Corporation, the makers of Firefox.”
Edit: from 2012 apparently. time flies https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/02/the-future-of-thunderbird-why-were-rebuilding-from-the-ground-up/
