Didn't downvote, but can you name a couple of Electron apps that are sna...,hell,.. not sluggish?
People usually point to VSCode...If that is the epitome of a responsive, lag-free software then I claim Electron defenders haven't seen snappy application.
Electron is overkill for a todo app that you want users to open/close many times per day. But if it's an app that's used for 90% while it's open and is used a few times per week, who cares if it takes 2 seconds to start?
I don't understand what everyone is moaning about with Electron. My app uses 130mb of RAM -- is that too much to ask for, for a dedicated video browser?
Aside from the initial load that all Electron apps suffer from, Insomnia feels pretty snappy to me. Granted, I only have a few dozens of API that load 20KB of JSON max.
I love Insomnia and usually recommend it to others.
But I remember a few months ago I was developing a basic API and testing it through Insomnia. At first, I almost had a heart attack seeing the time it took to answer, between clicking "send" and getting a response back. All this running on localhost, on an old but fairly powerful box (i7-3930k, 64 GB ram). My first reaction was I must have had some sleep() lying around.
Then I looked at the details, and the actual time taken handling the call, etc, as reported by Insomnia was a few ms, all the rest was... I don't know what.
But I do agree than other than that, when interacting with the app itself (switch requests, type, etc) it feels snappy enough. I usually use it alongside IntelliJ, which while fairly fast, isn't terminal-level instantaneous.
Maybe try elaborating yourself? The constant criticism of Electron Apps is that they're bloated and slow, you're claiming otherwise but missed the part providing any presumption of evidence to the contrary.
I've yet to experience any Electron App that's close to the snappiness and UX of the original native Spotify client, I'd like to hear about good examples of Electron Apps comparable to it.
Electron adds no more overhead than Chrome does. Any snappy web app can be packaged as an Electron app and be equally snappy. So if there are no snappy Electron apps it's because of the web, not Electron.
The web is filled with bloated and slow web applications. This is nothing new. Electron is taking the fall for existing on a popular platform that lots of fast moving companies are using and unfortunately gumming up with feature creep and poor architectural design.
I don’t care to share details of my past employers but I have absolutely worked on web apps that ran 60 Hz on mobile and looked beautiful to boot.
It was a team of senior devs though, and it was a small shop. We didn’t suffer from the same organizational issues at the time but as we grew, sure enough - the web application slowed as the need to move quickly and cut corners arose.
The point is that the web offers you a vast array of performance footguns that anyone on a tight schedule is going to wind up firing off at one time or another. Electron isn’t to blame. It’s architecture and code practices.
But the web is easy to hate, and by association Electron is going to take a ton of flack.
Right, so still no evidence despite continuing to claim otherwise. Lets start off easy, what's the best example of a publicly downloadable Electron App that has the snappiest UX?
Having experienced the original Spotify App myself and having used many Electron Apps daily for years I'd posit that it's naive to claim the responsiveness and snappiness of the original Spotify App could ever be reimplemented in Electron. You're claiming it is, so lets hear about some examples we can actually use?
No evidence? I have no obligation to hold your hand.
I’ve worked in the industry for something on the order of like 15 years and have worked on extremely snappy web apps that I don’t personally care to name given my association with them.
I’m sorry you are disappointed by the web. I actually find VSCode to be an impressive achievement with Electron, though, fwiw - which is probably not much given your obvious predisposition.
If you make a ludicrous claim the onus is on you to provide some resemblance of evidence to back it up, the extent and reasons you go into avoid doing so is obvious and transparent.
VS Code is a good general multi-purpose text editor that I use daily, but it's nowhere near the responsiveness and performance of a native editors like Sublime Text.
Opening a 1MB text file with no other VS Code windows open takes up 350MB, Sublime is 48MB. If I want to view a file quickly I'll use a native text editor. But please keep baselessly spouting how Electron produces the snappiest apps and how it's everyone elses fault for assuming just because every Electron App they've ever used is slow, it's not Electron's fault - which apparently when used in stealth internally produces just as fast and snappy UX's as native Apps.
I did not say Electron intrinsically produces snappy apps. I said that one CAN produce snappy Electron apps.
Which is indeed true, but as highlighted elsewhere by more reasonable individuals - the baseline for the web is slow. It requires expertise to do right, and in ways other platforms might not demand.
The benefit? Run it everywhere. The downside? $$$ and time. That’s why most just take their “run everywhere” benefit and accept the fact their app is going to be slow and/or a hog.
We’re discussing the platform’s potential, not the common case result of the platform’s broad userbase.
> I said that one CAN produce snappy Electron apps.
You're still asserting they CAN without being able to cite any that does. You've only highlighted everyone's favorite VS Code example whose performance and resource usage is definitely not comparable to native text editors.
Everyone already knows the obvious benefits of Electron and why it's popular, that's irrelevant to your baseless snappiness claims on a thread about the impressive UX and responsiveness of Spotify's original Desktop App which even they themselves was not able to recreate when they moved to their new Desktop's CEF/Web UI architecture.
One needn’t exist for my claim to be true. It’s based on how the actual platform works and having built performant web sites. I would agree nearly every mainstream Electron implementation is a mess, but so is nearly every mainstream website. It’s rare companies deem it important to build that level of performance because by and large customers don’t give enough of a shit. Except Hackernews posters, that is.
It doesn't matter if that rotating loading indicator icon is rendered at 120hz or how fancy the boot animation is presenting latest commodities of the company shop...
When I open a software, I did so for a purpose, and I expect to actually do the thing as fast as possible and be done with UI...that's the reason why TUI apps are popular with power-users
That’s not what I mean when I say 60 Hz. I’m referring to performance navigating about the app. There was a small startup latency to populate the store but it was smooth sailing after that. Even that you could probably optimize out today with a talented team given all the new PWA tech.
I will say though that I’ve yet to work anywhere else that held themselves to a comparable performance standard.
Yep. I’m not familiar with a lot of great web apps anymore. The web has gotten really lazy, these days.
To the extent you understand the tech, though, you understand the problem was never the platform but really the hands it resides in. Nobody thinks its worth the extra work required to heavily optimize a web application.
One needn’t exist for me to be right, as unsatisfying as that may be to a group of folks unfamiliar with frontend perf on the web platform.
Anything is possible. No one here is arguing it’s absolutely impossible for an electron app to be fast. But as you said the amount of work it would take is simply not worth it… with a lot less effort you could make a much more performant native app, so it’s never gonna happen.
You’re being pedantic and are upset that you’re being called out.
Hardly. I think it’s extremely worth the investment to make performant web applications. It’s the true vision of write once run everywhere. That a lot of naive leadership teams don’t understand or care to invest in that is a mistake - or perhaps a forced hand due to the lockout of web apps from the phone app ecosystem - not a demonstration of infallible analysis on the utility of the web platform.
The problem is not Electron. It’s far bigger than Electron. I realize this is a take that requires knowledge of the web platform and industry, however, and as such may simply be lost on folks without that context.
You’re being hard headed and am upset I don’t agree with you. Hope that helps
Web technologies are default-slow while native (except Java on Android) is typically default-fast. One needs to go out of their way to create a slow native app, even if it's of course possible.
Slowness is the natural state of web applications and creating a fast web application is much more difficult and requires a senior team with knowledge about browser implementation in order to avoid or work around the performance pitfalls.
I also have the feeling that such performance comparisons are done with the assumption that the apps under test are almost the only thing running on the machine. If every applications were to start 10 processes taking 1 GB of RAM things would get uncomfortably slow.
Upgrade :) I just upgraded from my Samsung S8 to a OnePlus 8 and the difference is amazing. Apps install in a second again instead of 20 and everything feels snappy.
I don't upgrade often for financial and environmental reasons but we're not at the stage yet where smartphones are a commodity and performance is stable over the years. There's still performance gains every year and they add up.
Up-voted for the same reason as the edit - I'd love to hear some fact based arguments why this comment should be down voted (why it's not possible to build performant applications with Electron)
Op did not provide a single example of an Electron app that competes with native performance. When pushed, they became indignant and said that they have personally worked on several snappy Electron apps, which, however are secret. Also, there are apparently no other examples of Electron apps readily at hand.
So we end up where we were, with VsCode as singular example, and in turn, with the distinctive suspicion that the inability of anyone to point to even one decently performing Electron app may just simply be because Electron is not very good.
The downvotes then probably arise from the fact that this argument has been replayed on HN hundreds of times.
It’s certainly an easy fall-person for their performance issues, but it seems just as reasonable to blame an ever-expanding feature set, including advertisements and all of the analytics to go with, along with a great deal of just… age? Spotify isn’t a young company anymore, and they’ve been maintaining their shop for long enough that the kitchen sink is undoubtedly strapped to their app by now.
Edit:
Upset downvoters care to elaborate? Or just huffing into the void?