That decision is easy: do users leave bad reviews for bundling a few hundred MB of Chromium?

Do they leave bad reviews if your app malfunctions due to the system webview behaving differently than the Chromium version you tested with?

Forget about saving websites as apps, no one does that. Not sure if it works on Desktop Safari, it certainly doesn't on iOS Safari. Not even persistent storage is offered for PWAs. Apple likes the billions in AppStore fees they rake in every quarter.

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asdfman123 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Much of Hacker News seems to be incapable of understanding the average user doesn't care about memory use at all, beyond a few extreme examples.

You don't need to argue with me about it: I'm not the average user. But they really do not care at all in most cases.

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skydhash 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Much of Hacker News seems to be incapable of understanding the average user doesn't care about memory use at all, beyond a few extreme examples.

They don't care, but they care about their computer being slow because of swapping. While they can't identify the cause and link it to the various Electron apps they're using (Teams, Slack,...) it's obvious for the tech-aware person they complain to.

	▲	asdfman123 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's true, but greater efficiency isn't going to sell more software if the users don't know they need it. At some level in your management chain there's someone who cares about selling more software above all else, and it's your job to do what they want. I don't like it either, but I've fought against it for too long to my own detriment. I think ICs have a responsibility to deliver quality software regardless of external pressures, but there's only so much you have time to do.

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Shorel 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Bad reviews?

Haha. I completely replace the software with a non Electron alternative if available.

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user43928 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Who cares, unless you pay?

A one star review, on the other hand, can have a material impact on the search ranking and consequently my revenue.

	▲	Shorel 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I stand corrected. I will leave one star reviews from now on.

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TheRealPomax 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's funny how folks can't even get that number right. Depending on how much you care to optimize, Electron adds 50 to 80 MB to your application. Those multi hundreds of megabyte apps? Yeah that's not because of electron, that's things like "we couldn't be bothered to actually think about the assets we bundled in". 100 uncompressed 16 bit PNG? Sure why not. 20MB worth of fonts because we don't like the built in ones and no we've never heard of subsetting? Let's go. 50MB worth of .json data files that we couldn't be bothered to gzip first? Who's going to notice!

Electron is way bigger than an app needs to be, of course, but those giant apps that you hate, 250MB just for a health tracker? That's not electron being the problem.

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Shorel 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Are you defending Electron apps? The audacity :)

Bruno consumes 300MB in RAM. The alternative I am using consumes 25 MB and it is much faster.

The difference is not because some uncompressed PNG or some fonts, it's the Electron architecture that is wasteful, by design.

	▲	TheRealPomax an hour ago \| parent [-]
		First off, RAM is not app size, and second, the point of having RAM is literally so it's there to be used. Sure, Chrome is absolute nonsense, but Electron is not Chrome, and an Electron app using 300 MB in memory where data needs to be uncompressed and directly accessible when your computer (including your phone) has gigabytes of the stuff to work with is just... irrelevant? That's pretty much pretending there's a problem for the sake of wanting a problem. And yes, not using electron will use less memory, which is an excellent reason to go "we're not using Electron". But there's a difference between "We want to use as little memory as possible" and "300MB of RAM on a system with 8 gigabytes of the stuff is a problem". The first is an excellent call. The second is nonsense =)