Based on "anyone disagreeing just dislikes the JS ecosystem", I feel like you might not want to grace me with a response, but I disagree /somewhat/.

Electron and web technology generally is certainly more performant than it once was, and I think people do malign Electron specifically a bit too much. VS Code continues to be the anti-example. It's always rather surprising it's just a web view, even on lower end hardware. (A several year old raspberry pi for example)

(Please note, I said "surprising it's just a web view", not "it's more performant than it could be if built differently".)

I think the main difference people tend to experience is a lack of care. I would say, for reasons I am NOT sure are causal, electron apps do seem to tend towards worse experiences on average in my experience. I think on the web, a quick flash of unstyled content or that ghost of the element you accidentally dragged instead of clicked are seen as just minor issues, because they're expectations of the web. If things go REALLY wrong, I have a whole rock solid toolbar above the app that lets me refresh if I think I'm in some infinite loop, or the URL bar I can look at if I'm not sure what page I was just redirected to. The back button promises to return me to where I was before. The browser is caging-in applications for me, so it's fine if they're a bit rowdy.

But using an application that is pretending to NOT be a web browser, seeing any web-quirk feels like I'm staring at rusted rebar in a cracked concrete bridge. The bridge still works, but now I'm aware of the internals of it and maybe that makes me feel a little more uneasy about standing on it. There is no back button if something goes wrong, and if there is, the app itself is rendering it. It's of course possible to hide that reality from me, but you need to care about sealing up all the cracks that let me see the rowdy internals.

To be fair, maybe that's just me that feels that way. And I do rather like the JS ecosystem.

I disagree because yes I dislike the whole JS ecosystem and the language itself. But also because Electron apps in general are resource monsters and while some are better than the others, Claude Desktop is definitely not one of them. Hell even their website will crash on Firefox very often.

Cannot agree more. Whenever I am making a decision like picking tech at work I always assume everyone who will use it has new $5k MBPs.

all the kids in schools with their chromebooks and whatnots? - oh well, they can tell their parents to get you an MBP :)

Claude is slow on a $5k MBP too.

Everyone has a 1000Mbps fibre connection too with 3ms latency. If not, well, they need to try harder at not being poor

hard disagree, Zed, for example, feels miles better than VS Code

The thing people miss is isn't not that there aren't downsides (power, memory, disk size, dependency ecosystem size etc etc) it's that they're still completely outweighed by the upsides of write-once-ship-all for authors.

How about power, and battery capacity?

also memory footprint, jank, and the pitch-black dependency forest.

I probably drink more web kool aid than the next guy but this is just not true.

Electron apps dealing with more than a small handful of data rapidly start to show poor frame timing and input lag.

I work mostly in the JS ecosystem, and am an Electron developer, and this is nonsense.