Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

Here's the thing. You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet, the answer is, "It wouldn't exist at all". Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it, and it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x the cost), and also in finding…

First off, the primary issues with Flash were that it was proprietary, had numerous security issues (due to its open source nature) and required custom, non-portable code. Electron is a free software platform that builds on the open web standards. It uses the Chromium browser, which is available on every major platform (that permits browser installation, that is). And it works with "walled garden" stuff like iOS/Safari, because the modern web actually does a pretty decent job of coordinating standards…

So true. I had to stop loading Slack at startup because it was using 400MB of memory and running eight threads. As the article says, come on, "It's just a text chat app." For Electron to be viable we need a "Chrome Core" library that just has a JavaScript engine and some OS glue.

Previous Discussion, as mentioned in the article as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14087381