Comment by rafram

Comment by rafram 4 hours ago

7 replies

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- Video games often use HTML/JS-based UI these days.

- UE5 has its own custom UI framework, which definitely does not feel "native" on any platform. Not really any better than Electron.

- You can easily call native APIs from Electron.

I agree that Electron apps that feel "web-y" or hog resources unnecessarily are distasteful, but most people don't know or care whether the apps they're running use native UI frameworks, and being able to reassign web developers to work on desktop apps is a significant selling point that will keep companies coming back to Electron instead of native.

harikb 3 hours ago

I have been building Desktop apps with Go + Wails[1]. I happen to know Go, but if you are ai-coding even that is not necessary.

A full fledged app, that does everything I want, is ~ 10MB. I know Tauri+Rust can get it to probably 1 MB. But it is a far cry from these Electron based apps shipping 140MB+ . My app at 10MB does a lot more, has tons of screens.

Yes, it can be vibe coded and it is especially not an excuse these days.

[1] https://wails.io/

Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Slack, Spotify? Cursor? VsCode? I have like 10 copies of Chrome in my machine!

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  • rafram 3 hours ago

    I've looked into Tauri and Wails, but they don't seem realistic for a cross-platform app with wide distribution across multiple platforms and platform versions.

    One of Electron's main selling points is that you control the browser version. Anything that relies on the system web view (like Tauri and Wails) will either force you to aggressively drop support for out-of-date OS versions, or constantly check caniuse.com and ship polyfills like you're writing a normal web app. It also forces you to test CSS that touches form controls or window chrome on every supported major version of every browser, which is just a huge pain. And you'll inevitably run into bugs with the native -> web glue that you wouldn't hit with Electron.

    It is absolutely wasteful to ship a copy of Chrome with every desktop app, but Tauri/Wails don't seem like viable alternatives at the moment. As far as I can tell, there aren't really any popular commercial apps using them, so I imagine others have come to the same conclusion.

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    • harikb 3 hours ago

      If the web-interface of a website can serve same HTML to all browsers, these UI can as well. I don't think we have IE6 level incompatibility these days. I have no idea what specific incompatibility you are talking about. I am writing my 4th desktop app since early 2025.

      But sure, you could have some specific need, but I find it hard to believe for these simple apps.

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  • hodanli 3 hours ago

    I am in love with wails. having python and JS background with no go experience. I pm'ed Ai agents to create a fairly complex desktop app for my own use. it is day and night in terms of performance compared to lightest electron app.

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anonymous908213 4 hours ago

Given that OpenAI managed to single-handedly triple the price of RAM globally, people will very much care about their chat application consuming what little scraps are left over for them, even if they don't know enough about anything to know why their system is running poorly.

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