Its not 1990 anymore, you have more than 2 megabytes of ram.
Honestly for me electron apps can also get pretty janky.
Plus Electron takes WAY more than 2mb of RAM.
And thus cripples battery life.
I only use things like Discord in Safari and Firefox to not have to use the Electron app.
I really don’t get how everything has to use web UI. SwiftUI is really easy to learn and you can run this on any Apple platform. Flutter is a mess but you can run it on Android. GTK looks just gorgeous and Qt can run on everything but ChromeOS (like 99% of things). Is it really too much to ask for 3 more developers in a company that build native?
Small addition: I unsubscribed like many others from 1Password because with version 8 even they switched from native to Electron. This is just crazy.
I mean guys, frickin think about people who can’t afford recent hardware! Do we really want Electron and thus Chromium/Google to force us to buy 1000€+ hardware to be able to do things?
Jank is one reason I’m not a fan of electron. It’s very common to gain extra scrollbars, for the contents to shift around weirdly. Things break in ways that native apps never do, due to the sheer complexity of web rendering these days. Customizability is nearly always lacking, especially when it comes to cooperating with the host OS’s preferences…
People that are upset about electron should consider it’s not:
Electron App vs Wonderful Fully Supported Native Linux Application
The reality is that your choice is largely:
Electron App vs No App (maybe running their windows app in wine if you can get that to work)
It’s not like companies are going to go build a native linux app but electron got in their way. It was always electron or no support.
So if you like the app, remember that the ram and the cpu you paid for doesn’t provide value unless it’s doing something. There’s no trophy you get at the end of your life for “most cumulative ram left idle”
remember that the ram and the cpu you paid for doesn’t provide value unless it’s doing something.
Remember that house you paid for doesn’t provide value unless you fill it with elephant shit.
That’s consumerism. Another equally shitty statement: your liver doesn’t provide value unless it dies from all toxins in the world.
lmao, yea. Besides, it’s not like electron is that bad either. We aren’t in 1990, why would you care if electron uses a gb of ram or ten processes or this or that… they think that native means good, but more often than not native means a shitty ugly unusable application that will work (not really) just on windows
If a fancy text editor starts eating hundreds of megabytes RAM without having loaded a file, i think we did something wrong.
Though Visual Studio can do that too without Electron.
Have you ever had, in good conscience, a problem caused by an electron app using too much resources?
Because we are, again, in 2023: the standard is 16GB of RAM, with CPUs much more powerful and with a lot of more cores and thread per cores than the past. Complaining about a PC resources being used when these doesn’t actually create a problem is like complaining about GUI being bloat; or JS/CSS being bloat.
This of course doesn’t mean electron is perfect, cause it clearly isn’t, but it’s a good enough solution that can be iterated upon (see Tauri) and improved (the DX on electron is shit). Nor that every app should be in electron.
So if you like the app, remember that the ram and the cpu you paid for doesn’t provide value unless it’s doing something.
It could be doing so much more if you hadn’t gone with Electron you fuck
From the comments that have mentioned the efficient programming languages, my guess is there’s a bunch of devs in here that never got past the “c++ is hard!” stage.
The first time I saw an office app launch in my browser, I was both impressed that they got excel to work in a browser and appalled that they wanted excel to work in a browser at the same time. And I’ll admit that it does perform well considering it’s running in a fucking browser, but I’ll still launch the native app any time I actually want to work with a file that’s opened in the browser.
You know that “no app” and “not using the app” is the exact same user experience right? So you can just not use the app and stop complaining about it existing.
Idk who you think you’re speaking for, but I don’t think it’s as many people as you think lol.
Besides an electron app you don’t use and no app are literally the same thing, so why choose nothing?
So if you like the app, remember that the ram and the cpu you paid for doesn’t provide value unless it’s doing something. There’s no trophy you get at the end of your life for “most cumulative ram left idle”
This is a damn homicide lmao
And very true. 32gb is 99 dollars Australia pesos, 16 is about 70 percent that. What a waste to let it sit around.
Running electron apps becomes a genuine ram issue when running heavy ram workloads like running heavily modded games
What about laptop battery life? More CPU usage = less battery life. WHY DOES NO ONE GIVE A FUCK ABOUT BATTERY LIFE???
The single most reason I switched from Spotify to Apple Music is that I was sick of seeing the Spotify macOS app at the top of the “High Battery Usage” page on Activity Monitor. I also actually noticed less battery life. Fuck Electron. I avoid apps made in it like the plague.
I think proprietary Electron apps better run in browser anyway because of trackers that you can disable via extensions.
I don’t hate that electron is used for everything, I just hate electron itself, mostly. Starting with that it’s memory consumption, measured at the example of Discord (though that may be not 100% accurate as they use a custom version), is higher than just using a separate FF instance, with a separate profile. Works for Discord and Spotify (though spotifyd + spotify-tui is better anyway). Signal etc. is still only available as an electron app.
The biggest problem I have with electron is more of a problem with Nvidia though - combining Nvidia + Wayland is bad enough, especially for windows refreshing below 60 Hz, as this causes them to flicker as in letting stripes of the wallpaper through. Electron apps are even worse, not only do they start to flicker as whole after not being in focus for 10 minutes, which is very annoying with them on other screens, but they also start to ‘lag’, as elements don’t update fluently. That affects EVERY chromium based program - including steam.
We were so close to a much better version of electron. Mozilla just killed off the concept of a separate engine, like chromium is, due to issues with low demand but high cost and instead only has the main FF repo now. A separate FF engine would very likely mean a FF based electron alternative would be built by the community. Bug free, fully compatible with everything, not under Google’s control.
Doesn’t Qt provide native, cross platform UI? I agree with your post though.
A lot of the time, the alternative would be a website running in the browser.
Electron IS a browser. It’s a Chromium browser to be exact with all the Chromium UI elements except the very bare minimum removed.
So the only difference that remains is running a website in a tab or in a fancy window.
I’d prefer that. One firefox instance can easily run 10 big fat websites while using like 6GB of RAM. 10 electron apps on the other hand? 32GB RAM won’t be enough.
There’s no trophy you get at the end of your life for “most cumulative ram left idle”
Some people like to use more than 1 app you know.
Also, RAM is never ever idle. It is used as filesystem cache when not used by programs thus speeding up read accesses significantly.
Alright, let’s nitpick! No, it is never ever idle, every few cycles is a refresh cycle, which is work.
Dude, if it doesn’t hog memory then what’s the problem?
It kinda do though. VSCode, without a project open has 10 processes running and uses over a half gig of ram. I like VSCode to be clear. I also like discord but it’s just a chat app and apparently needs a half gig itself and 6 processes.
You should come over to vim. It only takes 12 months of intense training and an additional 3 years of super glueing random rc file configs together before it works how you want it to
I hope they’ll find a way to run all those applications in one browser. Like basically having a browser with multiple tabs but getting treated like seperate sandboxxed apps.
Browser already do this. At least on Linux all browsers use namespaces(containers) for tabs
It is slow and usually anyway consume more memory than any native application built the same way due to it have to run a web browser. It is also taking up more storage space and updates are bigger and you need to watch out for we browser security holes. I think Electron have some limitations so you can’t do everything you want with it like a native application.
This might be a hot take but I’ve noticed some complicated electron apps are faster than some simple native apps. The striking example to me is how Vs code runs better and has a lower startup time than the stock Windows 11 File manager.
A well written electron app is better than a poorly written native app sometimes.
I mean sure once you start getting big enough, you’d probably be bundling all the features of chromium anyways, and any extra bloat is meaningless. Chromium and thus electron are extremely well optimized so if you are using the full feature set it will be fast.
But please stop using vscode as the benchmark electron app. It is not comparable. No other application in history has as large of a talent pool as vscode and It’s possible none ever will either.
I mean, sure, but:
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The Windows File Manager is really just awful in that regard. You can get alternative file managers that start up in a fraction of that time, with more features.
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Startup time isn’t really the worst of it. RAM usage is worse. And if a program uses lots of RAM, it will still appear quite performant. But it makes everything else on your system slower.
file manager opens instantly.
genuinely curious, I have a shitton of networked drives and at least 7 volumes on this locally, file manager has always popped open ready to go at a click or hotkey.
I don’t know, man. I haven’t done a scientific study on it either.
It was one of the reasons why I switched from Windows to Linux. On the same HDD, with same data, Windows file manager took half a minute to open, when the various Linux file managers were all instant.
I did ‘refresh’ Windows beforehand, too, which Microsoft claims is like reinstalling. Couldn’t easily do a proper reinstall, because of OEM license horseshit.
These days, I only really see Windows when colleagues are using it. That’s all within my company’s network drive infrastructure. Maybe it is being slowed down by that.
That’s still proof enough for me, though, that Windows file manager is shittily coded. A proper architecture would have the UI in a separate thread from all the file operations and it should never be the case that a slow hard drive or network drive is causing the UI to appear later.
Are you using the Windows 10 file manager? That one is so much faster than the new Windows 11 one.
There’s also the added CPU overhead from using JavaScript for everything to contend with.
As long as the program is not bloated, JavaScript can be fast. Unfortunately that’s not the case with most programs.
Can you recommend some third party windows file managers?
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Stock file manager has an okay UI (tabs are super nice) but is kinda slow, especially on battery.
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I tried explorer++ but its UI is clunky and it’s only slightly faster than the stock file manager.
Well, the file manager I use on Linux, Dolphin, has an experimental Windows version.
When I learned of that a few years ago, I gave it a shot on Windows and I prefered it to File Explorer, but it’s not like I compared it to other offerings or anything like that.
I do think that’s the best file manager on Linux and most features were working on Windows back then, so it’s not unlikely either, that it is by far the best offering for Windows. But it could also be a buggy mess. I wouldn’t know…
That’s not a compliment to Electron, that’s a heck of an indictment to Microsoft messing up the File Manager.
It’s legitimately hilarious to me when the creator of the OS ships web-based UI on their own operating system… Like teams on windows. Not only is it a terrible experience, slow, buggy and sluggish - it’s obviously not native - on Microsoft’s own OS! Where they’ve made all the UI APIs!
You can use C++ for web technology instead of JavaScript? I’m taking a class in C++ right now so I’d be happy to swap janky JavaScript for pedantic but speedy C++ in new projects.
VSCode is a desktop app, hence using real languages is easy. For websites there is webassembly. Try this: https://www.rust-lang.org/what/wasm
It’s getting there!
I’ll take shitty electron apps over winforms any day of the week.