Aaaand it's electron garbage.
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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Out of the loop, what's wrong with electron?
It's basically Chrome. It's not a real application, it's a website pretending to be one. It uses a metric fuckton of RAM and eats your battery faster than Prince Andrew a minor.
If Firefox could allow their engine to be packaged like this I'd use it. The problem I see here is chromium. Everything is a trade off and we need more ways to build maintainable cross platform applications.
Slack, for example, is Electron and it runs great. One of the best apps I've used. And it works better than the browser version...
The hate on Lemmy of electron is a bit of an overreaction if you ask me. Yeah it uses more ram than is necessary but again everything is a trade off. Not everything can be a hard to maintain rust app. Let's try to embrace cross platform solutions, though yes fuck chrome/google, so sure criticize that part of it.
There is Tauri which packages it with WebKit and uses Rust as backend.
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Each electron App is actually a full independent chromium browser install running a website. It's easy to code for and works cross platform as a result, but it's essentially just a website, although they can run offline depending on what's been built in to the local app.
Each electron app running on your system is a separate full chromium app running, with no sharing of resources between each instance. So they take up a lot of space each and duplicate all the resource usage, and potentially the security flaws.
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It's what you deploy to your users if you want to work around ad blockers and browser extensions. It's a great tool to get operating system level access to exfiltrate information about your users and identify them uniquely, even if they would prefer that not to happen.
All that with the help of Google's telemetry engine aka Chrome, which further helps Alphabet to manifest their interpretation of web standards in the world.
We worked to move things onto the web. Now people bring the web back to your desktop with every application bringing it's own browser shell. We have come full circle and we're now using 10x the resources.
Electron is the prime example of everything that is wrong in IT.
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Ugh, I was looking forward to replacing Thunderbird/Bridge, but never mind.
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Yeah, Proton is awesome, that's for sure. Now, being a "security and privacy" company, it blows my mind that they put so much effort on making apps for Windows and Mac first, leaving Linux behind, and when they finally get to it, they just dump in a glorified PWA. This world is really weird 🤣🤣
And that they decided to go with RPM and DEB instead of just doing a Flatpak
Are you kidding me? Doesn't bother me that much, as I use Thunderbird with Protonmail bridge. I'm still waiting on Proton Drive for linux. Well, I'm gonna end up self hosting at this point. :(
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“Finally” really is the key word, waiting for Proton to add features or apps is painful at times.
Glad they’ve finally made progress with this.
Waiting for Proton to acknowledge and fix critical bugs that can cause data loss was way more painful.. took them years with the solution being "just wait for the bridge rewrite it will be (most likely) fixed there".
Its just a webview app..
Yep. Installed it, started it, saw it is basically the website in an embedded browser, uninstalled it.
Like, come on, you have a web version. Why should I use an extra application to view a website. This seems like a cheap excuse for a desktop app.
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Speaking of mail apps, has anyone used Thunderbird recently? I had used it for a year or two up until . . . a year or two ago (probably two or three, actually) and then switched to kmail to satisfy my masochism. Thunderbird just hadn't been doing it for me with meh functionality and slightly more meh looks.
Fast forward to yesterday when I'm updating my steamdeck desktop to use nix stuff instead of rwfus+pacman and I couldn't get kmail from nix to behave right so I thought I'd give thunderbird another look. I'm several hours into tinkering with it and holy hell has it changed pretty much completely from a few years ago. Looks fantastic and works pretty much exactly how I want/expect it to. Good job mozilla!
Thunderbird is fine.
Tbh I have no idea what they are doing though, they have more funding than GNOME but after Supernova I didnt see any updates.
See my list of flatpak repositories
There is an unofficial Thunderbird nightly Flatpak, that will likely reveal what the hell they are doing.
So Supernova is kinda nice, mainly a big overhaul of the underlying stuff, making it easier to maintain.
It lacks a ton of things like Threads (the addon TB Conversation works though). Also their "spaces" bar is useless, as it just opens tabs, so it is redundant. Good idea, but only if it could replace tabs.
Their search and filter stuff is still the same, really bad. Either displaced in the message list column, as the global search still opens a new tab which is kinda bad UI.
Some addons broke too, not a big deal though.
I have the feeling they removed nested filters, which is extremely bad, but filters still work.
Thunderbird works well.
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Yes Thunderbird is getting really nice nowadays.
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"After years of pushing their proprietary and closed solutions to privacy minded people Proton decided that it was in their best interest to further bury said users into their service as a form of vendor lock-in. To achieve this they made more non-standard desktop clients for their groupware features (contacts and calendars) and the bridge will be discontinued soon."
Only if there wasn't CardDAV, CalDAV, IMAP, SMTP and dozens of other highly standardized protocols to handle e-mailing and groupware.
Is the bridge actually being discontinued? People have been saying that a lot recently but I've not seen any evidence for it, and not in the linked article.
I'm annoyed that they don't support SMTP, but realistically they actually can't unless they have the ability to read your email, which they don't.
Is the bridge actually being discontinued?
No, but what from their moves it is very clear it won't live long.
they don’t support SMTP, but realistically they actually can’t unless they have the ability to read your emai
Technically they do use SMTP... and it's possible for a provider and provide submission and generic SMTP do clients without having to read the email content.
There are lots of ways to do e2e encryption on e-mail (no server access to the contents) over SMTP (OpenPGP, S/MIME etc.). There are also header minimization options to prevent metadata leakage. And Proton decided NOT to use any of those proven solutions (in a standard and open way at least) and go for some obscure implementation instead because it fits their business better and makes development faster.
Because with proven concepts the swiss intelligence services would be locked out. And now people have to trust their claims of "swiss privacy laws" (who are shit - the worst in Central Europe. Switzerland had multiple scandals, from a system that had intelligence files on a large percentage of their "unreliable" citizens as part of the "Fichenskandal" to them recently admitting that most internet traffic within and all traffic leaving and entering Switzerland is monitored by the swiss intelligence services - without so much as a judges permit). Yeah, I know, they are audited....But since Snowden we all know how much that is worth.
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Proton Drive though 😭. The Windows app is so nice, wish we could get that for Linux.
I've set up an Rclone for the time being, not great but it works well enough for basic bisynchronisation.
Oh... I thought they meant Drive is finally out. That sucks. :(
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"Anyone can download the app, but free users will be given a 14-day trial to test drive it.'
So it's only for premium users ?
Hey it takes effort to make a WebView for mail.proton.com
They need to see how to package the dedicated browser for all the different distros and operating systems, make a nice icon and so ok. It takes hours
They should sell this masterpiece for much more
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I never really understood the need for such apps when mail clients such as Thunderbird exist.
Proton forces you to pay for a bridge to use Thunderbird.
Tutanota doesn't even provide that.
These "privacy respecting" email services don't respect the user enough to let them use third party email clients easily if the user chooses to.
Proton mail has some extra (security?) feature, or they just lack smtp support, and you cannot directly use it on thunderbird. They offer a "bridge" app which allows you to do it, I just use that.
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(Webmail provider releases a bespoke desktop app)
(me, old fart, bumbles out from behind the cables and servers and muck)
You fools! Have any of you whippersnappers ever heard of IMAP? No? Thought so.
[I'm not that familiar with ProtonMail. Chances are they already support IMAP. In which case: ... ....why? Why this? Why in this day and age?]
It's worse than you thought.
The webmail provider released a dedicated browser that can only open the webmail and called it a "desktop" app.
Additionally, they don't support IMAP. There's an app to run on your computer that becomes a bridge. The proprietary protocol is translated to IMAP. You can't use your favorite client if your operating system can't run that bridge and you're not a premium user because for "reasons" only premium users can run that local bridge
they don't support IMAP
They don't support IMAP because they want emails to remain end-to-end encrypted, and IMAP doesn't have any way of doing that. The gateway decrypts the emails locally, then serves them as plain text.
We need something better than IMAP, that's designed for modern use cases. Something that's not stateful... Maybe a web service or something like that. JMAP seems promising but barely any providers have implemented it.
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Cool. Now please do Proton Drive and Calendar. Please and thank you Proton.
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Is this where the source code is supposed to be ? https://github.com/ProtonMail/inbox-desktop
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I sure hope they make a Flatpak like they did for VPN (although it's not working properly at all rn). I don't get why they are still troubling themselves to support two other formats already during beta, when this is probably just an Electron app.
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