In the article, the claim is made: if many popular software products like Slack, VSCode, and Docker Desktop all use Electron, then it must be good.<p>In response, I would say: while Electron makes it easy for the software developer to build and distribute software, especially on multiple platform, as an end user it is NEVER the best experience.<p>That's why there are people spending significant effort to develop better solutions than Electron. For instance, the Tauri project ( <a href="https://tauri.app/" rel="nofollow">https://tauri.app/</a> ) is a lightweight alternative to Electron.<p>The article defends the minimum application bundle size of 100MB-300MB is as no issue, because streaming 4K video takes much more bandwidth than such a software download. But the bigger issue than disk space or download bandwidth is the RAM usage and overall low performance of Electron projects. Even with a 16 GB or 32 GB RAM system, when you're running many apps and doing serious multitasking, the gigabytes quickly get used up and then things slow down.<p>For example, if you have used VSCode, try using the Zed editor (<a href="https://zed.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://zed.dev/</a>). You will be blown away by its incredible speed. Launches in the blink of an eye, and it responds to every input with zero latency. We have forgotten that software can actually be fast.<p>Jonathan Blow, "Will Software Stop Getting Slower?" <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ka549NNdDk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ka549NNdDk</a>
While it’s just one small section of the article, I notice there is the sort of industry-standard erasure of the entire concept of good vs bad UI or engineering, in the “Web apps are bad” section.<p>A “good” app, in this article, is one that is “successful, versatile, [or] capable.” Any McDonald’s kiosk is an example of a “good” app, because it’s so “successful.” If you think a much-used app has UI that isn’t “good” and would be improved by using native technologies, well, first of all, “the market” is the arbiter of what’s good, not you, and second of all, even if you are right, your criticism lacks empathy for the “requirements and constraints” developers face, you are ignorant about the fact that things have tradeoffs, or you are some perfectionist who thinks everything needs to be a work of art.<p>Software engineers are so preemptively defensive about quality.