I'd note that as stuff like A11y gets added into something like Discord, we'll see the app slowly bloat up to compensate.

Google Chrome generally used around 25mb per tab in 2010. Today, that number is often 500mb or even 1gb.

All the native APIs across major platforms have accessibility features, how do you think browsers implement theirs?

The Windows settings scale resources for the OS, not per application. The more applications you use, the worse these settings become. If I'm unable to use an application's own features to modify the size of something in its UI, I have to fall back to the Windows settings. That leads to the following:

1. Use the make everything bigger/font size settings to change the size of what I currently can't see

2. Restart

3. Open every application I need, and go through every major feature in each of them to determine if I can still see things comfortably, while making sure no elements have exploded in size as this also leads to usability problems

4. If not, go to 1

I have to do this every time I install a new application, or one of them updates and changes their UI or decides to opt into the Windows accessibility settings. The latter one happened a few years ago with Firefox, and cost me a day to sort.

Invariably, it leads me to compromising on what I can and can't see.

Before Electron/VS Code popularity, finding an official Linux release for popular GUI software felt like winning the lottery. You'd occasionally see an exuberant front page Reddit post about some random chat client finally releasing a Linux version after 12 years of "coming soon".

Post-Electron it quickly became the norm to support Linux at release and people would expect to see it on day 1. Especially for anything vaguely dev related like the YCombinator startup of the week.

And it would have 1:1 feature parity with the Windows/MacOS version by default, not missing half the features or frozen in time at V1.0 like some "in name only" official Linux ports I remember having the misfortune to use.

It's been memory holed by now after Electron became ubiquitous and associated with bloat. But it (and webapps in general) made a huge difference for "year of the Linux desktop" to be as viable as it is today.

Its a straight-up business decision, generally made by MBAs and with advice from engineers and executed by the engineers. That's because it changes the shape of the org when you need a separate team for each platform, so any org where the benefit of doing so doesn't get articulated sufficiently, will end up with fewer devs covering more platforms.

Acting like this is a decision the ICs make is disconnected from why electron is so prevalent.

If it’s so easy to provide a better user experience using something else besides Electron then logically you should be able to point to chat apps that won over more user adoption than Slack and Discord.

Someone would have been able to disrupt that market by making a much better chat app since Elecron is so bad for user experience.

Do you have an employer?

Discord actually launched as a web app, and then moved to adding a desktop app, which has quite obviously become far more popular than visiting discordapp.com and using it in the browser.

Why do you think that is?

I'll give you a hint: if I close my web browser, how do I get a notification that I got a new message? Make sure you also pretend it's 2015 (launch year of Discord) and that I might be using Firefox, Safari, or Edge.

The funny part about this complaint is that you can literally just use the web app if you hate the desktop Electron app so much. That's one of the main benefits of Electron!

Noone is claiming that, though.

Discord isn't packaged as an Electron app simply because it pretends to be native, but because it has an entire system integration layer that isn't available in the web version.