2d ago

Things people get wrong about Electron

felixrieseberg.com Things people get wrong about Electron

From $25,000 Bloomberg Terminals to SpaceX spaceship controls, web tech is powering systems you'd never expect. Many desktop apps are built with Electron. Why build with web tech — and why bundle parts of Chromium to do so?

As an open source project, our website never had to "convince people" to use Electron, so I never took the time to actually explain why I'm betting on web technologies to build user interfaces or why I prefer bundling a rendering engine.

2 comments

Electron isn't here to compete with anyone. It's a free open source community effort filling a gap. If you want to defeat Electron, you will need to fill it too; and you will need to do a better job than Electron is doing today — at the things that allow us to deliver a good experience.
I think that's the big takeaway, people like hating Electron (like yours truly), but if you want Electron to stop being so common there needs to be an alternative that's as powerful and flexible. Nobody wants to make that. Electron works, it's stable, it's industry standard, it's not performant but it performs well enough, and you can't beat web browsers in having a massive ecosystem where everything just works.
Tauri tried to be the Electron killer but it became apparent that OS-specific web-views aren't something developers want to deal with, and IIRC they're also looking into embedding a browser runtime which will make it more or less Electron again...

Many of the Electron maintainers are here to build desktop apps that end users love.
Problem is I hate all of the electron apps that I'm forced to use with passion for being horrible, it's probably not electron.