Electron apps are now “normal” and even considered “better” than native ones.

How the fuck did we get to this dystopian timeline of a situation.

Blame OSes and the web.
From a business and hobbyist perspective, it's the faster way to have your app working everywhere.
Also, it provides a coherent experience on the browser or with the "native" app.

And yes, it is a lot less efficient and a lot bigger than a truly native app, but who cares about this these days?

I'm developing personal apps on electron and honestly, I like it. The simple fact that you can use the same tech as the web makes you work faster and is less prone to bugs.

Don't forget the e=mc2 equation. Errors=more code squared.
A common codebase across platforms is a good thing.

That being said, there is a lot of room for improvement.
It makes me think about the "js is to avoid at all cost" Era. Now, after it improved, almost every website use it

i don't know where this opinion originated from but as a person who did desktop development for 8 plus years of his career I can say that once windows forms slowly died (this is from the perspective of a .net developer) all the other frameworks were either tedious or complete failures.

wpf for example is awful. it is an abomination in the eyes of man and god.

it lacks real structure and makes app layout horrific and imho does not integrate well with the designer which also leaves much to be desired.

metro just sucked.

html5 apps for windows desktop was not a terrible idea but still fell flat.

gtk is a nightmare on linux that I have no interest in living through.

winforms was fairly straightforward, the object structure was hierarchical but it came with its own problems.

so now you got an mvc style framework that people are creating real apps with, eg electron.

you can communicate between the processes via a simple import.
...

you can create all manner of event handlers for differing ui elements and the browser itself.

yeah.. it uses a goddamn browser, which I don't like which is why I don't swear by web applications.

single point of failure and in the past major point of failure allowing hijacks and unwanted binaries to be installed.

has that gotten better ?
nope.
on windows it still leads to crap happening.

but.

since windows forms, from my perpestive, electron seems to finally accomplish what all the xaml and markup push was trying to accomplish, taking a fairly standardized method of development for web and making it all run on teh same comp.

so in a sense, along with css4 it is a pretty good idea.

that being said my experience with it has been limited to automating retrieval of information from websites where the design is poor and i don't want to click 2000 links to get what i need for my own purposes.

yes i know, selenium, whatever, electron actually works, all the other headless browser frameworks seem to fail utterly.

@react-guy i just personally worry about adopting this for critical things. because of the web aspect. because it packages a browser that used to be distributed as malware once modified.

and the single point of failure being that one process anyone who has access to your machine or MTM's you could sneak a spybot onto your machine that watches what you're doing with the app you just downloaded.

its like anything else.

If i ran things I'd have my own team source check the entire linux os and all tools we use and make sure there were no gotchas, personally. 'waste of money' or not, there seems to me to be an empty market for this, which is proving all these open source technologies before implementing them.

it still makes less than 0 sense to me that M$ inserted visual code into the equation.. maybe they were hoping open source contributors would help them cut costs like everyone else.

Welcone to the club "I hate this web framework everything trend"... And than for stupid phones they spent all the resources on native apps

I don't put any faith in Electron, but NeutrinoJS and right UI/UX considerations (such as being able to control everything by keyboard, flawless design) - I think it's a good match to "nativeness". Sucks that many apps lack the former!

Web based implementation still suck donkey balls , feels choppy and poorly made