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points by tekla 17 hours ago | 0 comments

The problem is that it made everyone's life worse.

Not mine. I loathe Electron like many people. But, as someone who is legally blind and has very limited vision, being able to have custom UI zoom levels, per application, has made my life much easier.

For a long time, and mostly out of frustration, I wanted to build my own stack of software around my vision. But the mammoth amount of effort it would require meant I never went through with it.

[–] freecodeio 16 hours ago

nice point, people like to shit on the web but it has one of the biggest accessibility features that most of the gui frameworks would just leave them as feature suggestions for years

[–] hajile 16 hours ago

I'd note that as stuff like A11y gets added into something like Discord, we'll see the app slowly bloat up to compensate.

Google Chrome generally used around 25mb per tab in 2010. Today, that number is often 500mb or even 1gb.

[–] masfuerte 15 hours ago

And Windows apps had accessibility before computers had 25MB RAM in total. Accessibility is not the cause of bloat.

[–] freecodeio 15 hours ago

do any of these native GUI libraries provide just as rich accessibility experiences to disabled people?

[–] TJSomething 9 hours ago

If we mean native as in OS-specific GUI APIs built-in to the operating system, then yes. All of the browsers are abstractions on top of that. If we mean cross-platform GUI libraries for Rust I think your choices are like Dioxus (a webview), Tauri (also a webview), Slint (draws its own widgets), and maybe Fltk (draws its own widgets) with extensions?

[–] ethin 5 hours ago

Yes, yes they do. WXDragon for Rust, for example, provides quite good accessibility. And maybe accessibility would be better for frameworks like QT or DearImGUI if (1) people didn't act like the web was some paragon of accessibility (hint: it really, really isn't, not when websites misuse web APIs -- which happens quite frequently) and (2) UI framework developers didn't just make a UI framework that looked sexy but left accessibility on the floor.

What's oddly being ignored in this entire thread (so far, as of the time of writing) is that back in 2017-2018 Discord was an Electron app and was completely inaccessible. The web did not magically bring accessibility to the table -- we disabled people had to go yell at Discord to fix their shit, and even then it took them like 2-3 years, and even now Discord has some very very weird accessibility issues that will randomly crop up here and there.

[–] saagarjha 1 hour ago

This is mostly because websites have gotten heavier and we want them to run faster.

[–] afdbcreid 9 hours ago

The article implies that a11y will exist on launch and maybe already is.

And it doesn't require that huge amount of RAM, no. What requires the Chrome RAM is running JavaScript and do it fast, and a lot of extremely complicated features, most of which a single app will never use.

[–] Ygg2 16 hours ago

Would you really need 500mb for accessibility? Can't text to speech be outsourced to the OS or companion app?

[–] pjmlp 9 hours ago

All the native APIs across major platforms have accessibility features, how do you think browsers implement theirs?

[–] sitzkrieg 5 hours ago

i switched a cross platform application TO web stack for this reason. accessibility and screen reader usability is incredibly important and massively overlooked in many domains

[–] Grombobulous 16 hours ago

The electron hate train needs to pull in to the station and be retired. We can just admit that it was a good solution for the problems of its time just like JQuery. Electron was conceived over a decade ago and it was an imperfect solution, but there’s no denying that it was a solution.

Election predates WebAssembly by 5 years and hit the scene only one year after Rust was first created.

And just like JQuery, its time is coming to a close as better frameworks are available now that weren’t available back then.

[–] afdbcreid 9 hours ago

We could, if people would stop doing it today.

[–] hackernud3s 8 hours ago

I made a bunch of Electron apps in my time. I always tried to talk the client out of it. "Just make it a website" I would say. Still, there were times where it made sense.

[–] bigstrat2003 10 hours ago

> We can just admit that it was a good solution for the problems of its time just like JQuery.

We would be lying if we did that. Electron was never, ever a good solution. It was something solely used by devs who prioritized their own ease of work over the actual user experience, i.e. bad devs.

[–] rpdillon 8 hours ago

Its a straight-up business decision, generally made by MBAs and with advice from engineers and executed by the engineers. That's because it changes the shape of the org when you need a separate team for each platform, so any org where the benefit of doing so doesn't get articulated sufficiently, will end up with fewer devs covering more platforms.

Acting like this is a decision the ICs make is disconnected from why electron is so prevalent.

[–] Grombobulous 8 hours ago

If it’s so easy to provide a better user experience using something else besides Electron then logically you should be able to point to chat apps that won over more user adoption than Slack and Discord.

Someone would have been able to disrupt that market by making a much better chat app since Elecron is so bad for user experience.

[–] kristiandupont 10 hours ago

Do you have an employer?

[–] s3p 16 hours ago

I never thought election was a good solution for the problems of its time. Just call it a web app and don't lie to people releasing something "native" for them to download.

[–] Grombobulous 16 hours ago

Discord actually launched as a web app, and then moved to adding a desktop app, which has quite obviously become far more popular than visiting discordapp.com and using it in the browser.

Why do you think that is?

I'll give you a hint: if I close my web browser, how do I get a notification that I got a new message? Make sure you also pretend it's 2015 (launch year of Discord) and that I might be using Firefox, Safari, or Edge.

The funny part about this complaint is that you can literally just use the web app if you hate the desktop Electron app so much. That's one of the main benefits of Electron!

[–] Kuraj 16 hours ago

Noone is claiming that, though.

Discord isn't packaged as an Electron app simply because it pretends to be native, but because it has an entire system integration layer that isn't available in the web version.

[–] Brian_K_White 10 hours ago

It was never a good solution and there is no reason to ever stop calling a turd a turd.

[–] bee_rider 8 hours ago

Electron was an ok solution to the problem they were looking at, “how do I waste as much compute as possible.” Unfortunately it had the side effect of drawing a bunch of stuff on the screen.

Luckily in the modern era we have invented language models, which allow us to expend vast resources on text generation instead.