this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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I love having multiple copies of Chromium installed on my system at the same time. 250 MB internet messengers please!
You ever notice how everything installs and uninstalls super cleanly and easily these days and software gets consistent regular updates?
That's because developers stopped min/maxing storage and started bundling all of an application's dependencies with it instead of trying to rely on globally installed packages and frameworks that can break or be missing or lead to dependency hell.
No one likes larger download sizes and more storage being used but the tradeoff is by and large worth it.
Isn't this about performance and not storage?
Making and managing an electron app is easier, but it is possible (with more work) to have clean install/uninstall, a nice UI, and consistent regular updates while still being fast and efficient.
Better programs will always need more work to create.
I am curious about what other options there are, and why Electron is what a lot of people go with.
People choose Electron because they already know how to write Chromium apps (web dev). It's really just ease of development, using another framework takes more specialized skills than using Electron.
That's why everything is Chromium these days.
The root cause is one step deeper, tbh: Web apps are cheaper. You take BSc's and make them create web pages, and hey, with Chromium they can also be your desktop app devs. No need to have costly MSc's for backend or full-stack work.
I mean this might vary depending on where in the world you are, but web devs earn a fair bit less over here.
Lmao where are you seeing backend shops just full of MSc's writing new sorting algorithm and arguing about the BigO notation of their problem?
I've worked at Fortune 500 and MAANG companies, and the overwhelming vast majority of backend engineers that I've seen have BScs at best.
It doesn't even make logical sense in the context of your argument given that Electron is purely a frontend technology. It has no bearing on your backend costs or how many backend engineers you need if you're building your frontend natively or with Electron.
Yeah, that's what I said.
?
In this situation you never needed MSc's...
It's not really because the developers are cheaper, it's because the vast reduction in complexity is cheaper. Let's say you've got a great general app idea and you're going to build a startup. Your app is going to have to be mobile and desktop. To do that well, natively, this means:
In short, moving from one platform to two natively doesn't double complexity and cost, it's far, far worse than that. It's not that a good web dev costs $70k vs an iOS dev that makes $90k, it's that a good iOS dev costs $90k, and a good Android dev costs $85k, and a good Windows dev costs $80k and one of those people hopefully is familiar enough with each platform to be the team lead so you can tack on another $20k for them...
And all the while you're building that team and building your 3 different platform native apps, a competitor or several will launch on Electron and web tech and take the market because no one except us nerds give a shit about whether something is using the right platform idiom or even knows what they are, and far fewer still have any idea how to check RAM usage and the like.