Finally, another web engine is being developed to compete with Chromium and Firefox (Gecko), and they’re also working on a browser that will use it.
Sounds like fun, but I wish we had a real multiplatform GUI framework that does not look like ass and does not perform like ass, so we can put the whole shameful electron era behind us.
That’s never going to happen, and the reasons are twofold:
Brands want to push their own style on people, to make themselves recognizable, and to push their ideas about UX to their users (because they obviously know better than the OS/DE/compositor/whatever people).
It’s easier and cheaper to build a web app, because there are so many web developers. It also usually allows you to give an “app” to people who want that, while giving a (perhaps somewhat limited) browser version to everyone else, reaching the maximum amount of users while maintaining only a single codebase and keeping everything more or less cohesive and looking the same.
Brands want to push their own style on people, to make themselves recognizable, and to push their ideas about UX to their users
That’s not a universal behavior though. There’s so many utilities and simpler apps made by indie developers or smaller companies that don’t care about this.
That’s technically true, but the apps “everyone” has are the opposite to that, and people are used to it and don’t really seem to complain. So if Facebook, Tiktok, Twitter, Amazon, Spotify and Aliexpress each do their own (garbage) thing, it shows other brands they can do that too, and they kinda ruin it for everyone. Basically the apps you spend most time in are probably like that, and it’s a shitty experience.
It just makes too much sense… The only way to get past electron is a better electron. Or just fix electron
We’ve been going after this concept for decades now. That’s what java swing was supposed to be, what python gtlk was supposed to be, and I’m sure there were others before that and there’s been a hell of a lot since then
It’s all trade-offs between flexibility, ease of use, and performance. Also between maintenance cost, portability, and existing library support
Electron is a good compromise. The execution could be better, but it’s come a long way. There is no one size fits all solution, but there are some decent options that handle that compromise differently
