I am at the opposite extreme. We should ditch electron and use browsers good enough integrated they can run all the apps with native feel and reusing the same engine (not a lacklustre OS webview but a complete one) This solves the memory overhead, solves unpatched or misconfigured chromium in each electron app as well as portability and reusing web dev skills. Also this would allow permissions and security to be managed by a layer that can focus on that and I don't have to worry about what a native app can do. (OS permissions and sandboxing are just not made for vibecoded infinite software and likely never will catch up) All the performance and other arguments are just not true, a well build webapp is often more performant than a native app especially for long scroll lists not even to mention accessibilty, extensions and more. I will never trust discord or Spotify to run something natively on my machine and so should no one else.

> All the performance and other arguments are just not true, a well build webapp is often more performant than a native app especially for long scroll lists not even to mention accessibilty, extensions and more.

A well built web app will never be more performance than a well built native app. It's just inherent due to the JavaScript abstraction.

The security boundary here is difficult, if you intend to integrate with native workflows.

Also difficult to manage fake websites duplicating the look and feel. Scamming people into giving access or passwords.

A native app which is installed once from a good source is more secure, i feel.

I just run discord in the browser.

The native one reads the titles of open windows on your desktop, and God knows what else.

(Well, I don't use discord at all anymore, but I very intentionally never used the desktop app.)

You can optimize all you want, but if your foundation is a pack of cards, you're not going very far. JavaScript is not a solid foundation to build anything on. It's a language that should have been extinct long ago along with internet explorer. But, people kept trying to save it - adding abstraction on top of abstraction, even languages on top of it (coffeescript, typescript) just to get it to work at the baseline of a decent language. It's the only language that is forced upon us. If browsers gave us options to use other languages, it would and should've been long been dead.

I agree with this. And even further, I think we wasted a decade or so, forcing web and native apart - especially on mobile. Partly due to Apple building a native moat when we could have put resources into building a more performant and powerful internet.

I'm with you.

I created my own declarative react-like UI library that is small, efficient, and does things just the way I want. I have absolutely no desire to go back to the days where for every platform I want to develop for, I need to learn whole new UI paradigm, with all its quirks and gaps and inefficiencies.

Past a certain age, having to do this every year or two get old fast. And, it is not necessary for good performance. The only holding back good performance and capabilities from web apps are the platform vendors.

In a way yes, but things like keyboard shortcut, file pickers and similar are major convenience issues and not as easy if the only thing that runs on the metal is a server process, and the UI is limited to the browser. A webview UI like Tauri might solve that (I'm not familiar with it, so I can't say if it does).

I think that's also the main reason software like VS Code is electron based and not browser based.

I rather we bring back Delphi and VB6 which if you dim’d your types could run faster than most people realize.

I think either end is good. Web apps that I can use in my existing browser session are fine, and so are native apps. It's specifically the worst-of-both-worlds middle ground that is Electron that I want to see go away.

> well build webapp is often more performant than a native app especially for long scroll lists

A well built anything is better than most software. I would argue that a well built rust app will probably a higher quality piece of software than typescript slop produced by Microsoft.

What? No, absolutely not. Did you not learn your lesson when google decided to actively try to kill ad blocking? Why on EARTH would I want all of my desktop apps at the mercy of google and chromium?

You can tell me until you're blue in the face that you also think these apps should be cross-browser but we all know that will never happen.

Not sure who's still using electron...Rust + Tauri is pretty much standard these days.