this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
373 points (91.0% liked)
Technology
59708 readers
1871 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Electron is capable of having just as good integration with the system as native applications. It's just that a lot of people are not optimizing these cross platform apps to have optimal integration with them. Electron has the safeStorage API that allows you to use kwallet or GNOME Keyring to securely store information. I believe both Discord and Spotify use this on Linux.
It will never have this since it's incapable of using native widgets and theming, which are far more important than just looks, especially to people with disability. safeStorage is something I didn't know about, but it seems it wasn't used. Apart from huge RAM footprint, Electron also wakes CPU a lot which makes it absolute garbage on battery powered systems.
You can criticize Electron’s performance and memory footprint, but as long as there’s an API to access something, it can access the same features as a native app, it just depends on the company’s willingness to do it. HTML is also one of the best platforms in terms of accessibility.
The problem though, is that cross-platform apps are optimized for that: sharing the same code among systems, and using specific OS features complicate things, so the tendency is to use the same solution for all of them, even when it isn’t the correct one. Also, they make it possible for developers who don’t know a certain OS well to still build for it, making things potentially worse in the user experience.
it is true that they do not integrate with widgets and theming, but that's not exclusive to electron. GTK apps don't follow system widgets, nor will they follow theming on non-gtk desktops. I do also prefer desktop apps not be written in electron for the performance reasons you mentioned.