Ask HN: Do you think Electron is good for building Desktop Apps?

I agree, Electron apps are way too big. They include so much cruft whether you use them or not.

I prefer to write apps with separate server and client parts and the client JS/HTML is generated by in-house tools and thus is a fraction of the size of anything that would uses any of the popular frameworks.

In any case, I'm finding that WebApps are easier to deploy and update than writing for native deployment. In the rare cases that I do need native features, I can deploy a local server which can then access whatever I need. The clean separation of concerns between client and server does simplify architectural design.

It makes it easier to get started, and you can often kinda-ish reuse some effort from your webpage at the cost of bad performance and non-native look/feel.

It's a trade-off for me, I use it when the trade-off feels right.

MVP: Yes. Production, complete products: No.

I'd say Electron is "good enough" for many purposes, meaning its advantages overweigh the disadvantages. Lower barrier to entry compared to native solutions, developer productivity, cross-platform sharing of code.. Plenty of large companies use it to build (even flagship) products.

The disadvantage that is most talked about is its final bundle size, and I'm not aware of any developments that are trying to solve it. I'm in a project with a number of Electron apps built and in the pipeline, and we're searching for a potential in-house solution, of a central app that hosts/downloads/embeds "mini-apps" that run on the same foundation, to share the same Chromium run-time. Really hoping for a community solution to this though.

Define "good" :)

If you need to have a desktop app quickly (for multiple platforms, even) and it's the difference between launching something or not, then yes it is good.

If memory footprint and performance is a critical part of what you're doing (it's not always), then maybe you should look at a different technology.

I think Electron has allowed a lot of cool things to come into existence that wouldn't have if not for Electron.

good in that it the easiest option for moderm developers to get something done? yes. but it is horribly inefficient and we the industry should provide a better tool than this nonsense

Much better than many native libraries. I added some extra node modules for some specific calls I needed and it went smooth. I'm now converting a second desktop app because it went so well. What disturbs me the most is the numerous process launched. Neither of them really big. I learned that it's also a benefit. not having total scope of a desktop app when you embed HTML+Javascript from uncontrolled sources.

I built Collate (https://collatenotes.com) with Electron and I'm a huge fan. Electron does has its downsides but I think that it's eclipsed by the upsides. For collate, those upsides are:

1. Ease of building and distributing packages with Electron-Builder. I'm able to build for all three operating systems on my Mac, took a few hours to set up.

2. Access to the vast NPM library for all sorts of functionality.

3. Ability to use CSS libraries for styling. I'm no designer so it saves me some time. Collate uses Bulma for styling.

From what I've seen, users are more than happy to have an application that solves their need no matter what it's created in. Most people don't really think about file sizes, or the fact that Chromium is packaged with Node, they just want their problem solved without visual or performance hiccups.

If it wasn't for Electron, Collate would be a very different application or non-existant. I think people need to look at Electron as opening the door to more possibilities.

Regardless of whether the HTML+JS+CSS stack is good for desktop apps... The one thing that bums me about Electron is that it bundles an entire web runtime with each app, even though a suitable runtime already exists as part of the operating system.

Seriously, WebKit on Mac and Edge on Windows would be just fine for >99% of Electron apps. Using the available web runtime would be a tremendous saving both in build size and memory usage.

Did you know that Chromium contains 25.3 million lines of code? [1] Each Electron app is bundling a separate copy of that enormous codebase in binary form. It's a terrible waste of memory.

It's true that supporting the native web runtimes would be more work for the Electron framework developers, and sometimes would also mean more work for app developers... But most web apps have absolutely no good reason to be tied to Chromium, so for app developers the diversity would actually be beneficial in the long term IMO.

If someone wants to start a project that's like Electron but uses the native runtimes, I'd actually like to contribute some work. Let's call it "Electrino"?

[1] https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/857794605076500480

The only Electron App which I use regularly is Gitkraken and I am quite happy with it. In my opinion it is not as snappy as a native UI but it is still fast enough that it does not matter to me.

Bad idea. We didn't learn from the mess that was bundled vs. installed JREs and if Electron apps become more popular, users will have dozens of different Chrome installations running on their systems, taking up disk space and memory and potentially interfering with each other (that's speculation on my behalf).

Go one step back: why desktop app?

Produces slow (I've yet to see one that wasn't pretty clunky), resource-hungry, non-native-feeling apps. Not a fan.

Also, bundling lots of different Chromes in apps which may or may not ever be updated feels like a security issue.

Electron definitely isn't the greatest: it's inefficient, duplicative, and makes your app way larger than it needs to be.

With that said, IMO Electron is great purely for the reason that it opens desktop development up massively.

I've written native apps before and it has been a world of pain. Electron lets me use tools and skills I already know to spin up desktop apps. I know I'm not the only one who this applies to, and there are a bunch of apps that probably wouldn't exist if Electron didn't. It's usually a false equivalence to compare Electron apps to full native apps.

If the choice is between an inefficient Electron app, or no app at all, I'll take the Electron app any day.

No, and Never,Since the Electron uses Chromium and Node.js so why not browser? Yes there are something browser could not do , and what I want to say is maybe there is stereotype. I have been using desktop software using web-gui in browser and they work just fine. there need something maybe a protocols that make browser more desktop, but this would never happen since it would give user too many power.

For now all the google-about things would always end up to benefit google instead bring convenient to user. Yes I just hate google, And what they bring to the web(For recent years only)

I think something like Electron should have been made but all I could find now is web browser or game engine.

There are already too many silly Apps on mobile platform, and Electron is just another that silly things in my eyes, since I'm just a stupid and arrogant user

I am a retrograde, grumpy, obtuse old curmudgeon, so let me bite:

No, it is a terror. Applications produced with it are bloated monstrosities, gobbling up hundreds of megabytes in both storage and RAM before getting round to as much as putting a checkbox on screen. Bundling an entire web browser inside your program in order to provide portable GUI functionality like what Tk managed more than twenty years ago without breaking a sweat, and at roughly 1/100 the size, yeah, sure, it flies. So did the Spruce Goose, sort of.

But then, I never took to js, I never took to Chrome, I never took to bloat as a way of life.

[edit: typo]

The only real issue I have with Electron, that I don't see brought up when it's discussed here, is the process model.

Last time I checked, each window in your Electron app had to run in a different process. This is a design that makes sense for a web browser like Chrome, but not for the majority of desktop apps.

If your app is simple enough to only need one window, this won't be an issue, but otherwise, I found it a major pain.

Ugly, bloated, poorly integrated and weird UI bugs, like scaling randomly failing on high DPI displays.

Only useful for web-only teams who have no desktop experience whatsoever. If you can afford to hire a desktop team, do it.

Kotlin?

Python Devs: What would you recommend as an alternative to Electron ? I've heard of PyQT, Tkinter or even PyGTK but not sure what to choose ... Cheers

The only one I use is VSCode. It's a great IDE-lite, but after a day or so it pretty reliably gets into a state where it's permanently and unusably slow, and needs a restart. I can't prove this is Electron's fault, but I'm inclined to give the VSCode team the benefit of the doubt. I certainly do not need to restart Sublime Text every day in order to use it.

And as an Old, I do believe there's a serious cultural problem, caused by the Web Rush, where the industry as a whole does not care enough about zero/low-cost abstractions.

My personal take on using electron if the following: If you are creating a big app that gets a lot of attention from the user electron is fine. If you are creating a little tool running in the background, electron doesn't work so well because it often uses a lot of memory. So, building a chat application with electron is bad and your main text editor for your dev work in electron is totally fine. Ultimately, the deciding factor should be your users, is it best for them that you use electron or are they better of, if you are using a different solution.

Something else to consider are your development skills. If you never worked with something else than web technologies, electron is hard to beat in terms of dev experience.

I can't say that I'm not a fan, I'm a hater who rolls his eyes off anything built with Electron.

I used to use linux desktop since 2012(ish) and I remember the time when most of my apps were Windows and Mac only! As a broke university student, I could not afford to upgrade to a Mac just to use some tools!

Electron has made me forget those days! Today, most of the tools I use are available on all platforms and while they do take up a lot more ram and disk space - both are generally things I can buy and fit on my computer and will be supported out of the box but not having those apps won't.

I know it's great to hate Electron because of how much ram and disk space it takes, but for those few on Linux, it's truly made life easy!