Eira@eiranoirx
Electron hate is one of the most confidently wrong opinions in tech. People say it like they've cracked something open. "Discord is just a website." "VS Code is Chrome with a titlebar." Yeah, and your kitchen knife is just shaped metal. The framing tells you nothing about whether the thing is actually good.
Writing a real cross-platform native app is brutally hard, and not because the logic is complicated. Every platform has different UI conventions, different system APIs, different accessibility models, different font rendering, different input handling. Write a macOS app in Swift and it looks great on macOS and doesn't exist anywhere else. Want Windows? WinUI, WPF, take your pick, each with its own learning curve and its own special set of things that don't quite work right. Linux? Qt or GTK, both of which produce apps that feel slightly wrong on every platform they target, and you're maintaining all of this in parallel, same features across three codebases, three bug trackers, three build pipelines, three sets of platform-specific nonsense to debug Or use Electron with just oneOne codebase.
"Electron uses too much RAM." VS Code idles around 150-300MB on a typical project. Sounds bad until you check what else is open. Chrome with four tabs is using 800MB. Your JetBrains IDE, fully native, compiled to the JVM, is sitting at 1.2GB before you've opened a single file. The native Slack alternative someone built in Qt uses 90MB, sure, but it also hasn't shipped a new feature in two years and the emoji picker breaks on HiDPI and nobody is fixing it. Memory is cheap. The RAM argument is almost always made by people who don't look at what their "good" native apps are actually consuming.
Chromium is good. It is one of the most tested, most optimized pieces of software running on consumer hardware right now. The rendering is fast. V8 is fast. The security model has sandboxed processes and site isolation baked in, which is more than most native apps bother with. Embedding it in a desktop framework is not a betrayal of some pure native ideal. It's using a genuinely good piece of engineering for a job it's good at.
The app is not slop because it runs on Chromium. The app is slop if the team who built it didn't care. Those are different things. Maybe stop confusing them.
