Comment on My poor RAM...
firelizzard@programming.dev 1 year agoThe point is that Slack does not take advantage of Electron at all. It’s no better than running it in a browser.
Comment on My poor RAM...
firelizzard@programming.dev 1 year agoThe point is that Slack does not take advantage of Electron at all. It’s no better than running it in a browser.
habanhero@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
For Slack it is. Building an app via Electron means it’s cross-platform by default, so Slack doesn’t need to invest in separate platform teams to solve the same problem (Windows, macOS, Linux).
Electron also has better support for things like native notifications, video and voice calls, offline capabilities, and to other native APIs etc that are either unsupported or spottily supported via the browser.
railsdev@programming.dev 1 year ago
It has all this support for native platforms yet it’s always a clunky memory hog that makes zero effort to respect the design language of the OS it’s running on.
I’m on macOS, I want the app to be a native macOS app. If I wanted it to look like a webpage, or Windows, or Linux GTK then I’d switch to one of those and expect it to match those paradigms.
habanhero@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Maybe so but it has improved a lot over time. The app devs share some responsibility too so it’s not all on Electron.
That’s the Dev’s design choice, not a limitation of Electron.
I don’t disagree but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter to enough people for it to become an issue. People are used to Slack and the way it works.
Moreover the cost of building the same app 2x or 3x simply doesn’t make business sense.
railsdev@programming.dev 1 year ago
I’m a web developer but is there no concept of classes, libraries, etc in other programming languages?
What happened to writing the “core” of an app that doesn’t rely on UI then simply writing the front ends for each platform you want to support?
You keep saying Electron is used for better compatibility and listing out Linux, Windows, macOS but here’s the thing — most companies are only targeting those. That’s just three (if you don’t write for a million desktops on Linux).
Is it really so hard to support just three environments with only the UI being tailored for the OS it’s running on?
Honestly, it just feels like poor tooling and a poor excuse.
pkill@programming.dev 1 year ago
Flutter?
habanhero@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
What about Flutter?
pkill@programming.dev 1 year ago
It’s a much more lightweight option for building cross platfrom apps than Electron. Heck, even Tauri is better than Electron even though it also uses web technologies for UI.