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0 pointsvedantroy7y ago0 comments

The point is that developers don't want to be testing against multiple browser/rendering engines--hence why Electron was built.

Maybe having multiple engines is good (although maybe the benefits are overstated since nowadays most engines align with the spec instead of implementing non-standard extensions like ActiveX), but it's not good for people for who want to quickly, and with low effort, develop desktop applications.

The point of the parent comment was that developers chose Electron over other frameworks for reasons such as speed of development, and DeskGap does not align with those reasons.

0 comments

kijin7y ago

What developers want is important, but what users want is even more important. If a lightweight app is what users want, that's a good enough reason for at least some companies to consider DeskGap over Electron.

I'm sick of sluggish "native" apps on my i7 PC with fast SSDs and 32GB of RAM. I don't even want to imagine how those apps perform on low-end devices.

icelancer7y ago

> but what users want is even more important

Only developers and very tech-savvy people bitch about Slack. Your average person working in Sales, HR, or operations cares not for the memory footprint of Slack.

It's also not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. Yeah, it's slower than mIRC, fair enough. But IRC is dead to almost everyone and Slack took over, so it is what it is.

saagarjha7y ago

They do, but they misdiagnose it as "my computer is slow" or normalize it because that's all they're used to.

1 more reply

dmitriid7y ago

Users don’t want a “lightweight app”. Users want an app with <a list of features>.

arvinsim7y ago

Exactly. If users are held at gunpoint and have to choose between a fast app and a feature rich app, I would bet they will choose the latter.

1 more reply

jhgg7y ago

The cost savings here is in download/package size, and not runtime performance. Chances are latest chromium is faster than the system web-browser.

kijin7y ago

Startup time matters. Chances are the system web browser is already cached in memory, whereas every Electron app wants to load its own Chromium runtime.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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kijin7y ago

I'm sick of sluggish "native" apps on my i7 PC with fast SSDs and 32GB of RAM. I don't even want to imagine how those apps perform on low-end devices.

icelancer7y ago

> but what users want is even more important

Only developers and very tech-savvy people bitch about Slack. Your average person working in Sales, HR, or operations cares not for the memory footprint of Slack.

It's also not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. Yeah, it's slower than mIRC, fair enough. But IRC is dead to almost everyone and Slack took over, so it is what it is.

saagarjha7y ago

They do, but they misdiagnose it as "my computer is slow" or normalize it because that's all they're used to.

1 more reply

dmitriid7y ago

Users don’t want a “lightweight app”. Users want an app with <a list of features>.

arvinsim7y ago

Exactly. If users are held at gunpoint and have to choose between a fast app and a feature rich app, I would bet they will choose the latter.

1 more reply

jhgg7y ago

The cost savings here is in download/package size, and not runtime performance. Chances are latest chromium is faster than the system web-browser.

kijin7y ago

Startup time matters. Chances are the system web browser is already cached in memory, whereas every Electron app wants to load its own Chromium runtime.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse