Electron is easier to use/develop on, is cross-platform, uses the most popular APIs/technologies(DOM, CSS, HTML). What not to like?

Huge performance regression compared to native, memory bloat, non-native UI, battery abuse, lack of access to tons of native controls, minimum common denominator UI, and several other things besides...

We cheered for ever more powerful CPUs all those years, then we lamented the end of that period and Moore's law, and now we voluntarily give up tons of power by turning every app into a bloated 3-4 layers abstracted browser+DOM rendering pane.

As a developer, your priority should be the utmost satisfaction of your users, not your convenience. The biggest lie one can tell themselves is "After version '1,2,3', I will make a good app". That's not how development works. Once you start something, you are most likely stuck with it. So start well and don't rely on the magic rewrite that will never come.

The question often isn't electron vs native, it's electron vs nothing. In particular, I find electron has been a great source of quality Linux ports, compared to what we used to get.

I don't work on Linux, so that is not a relevant question for me. Also, I often find Electron apps to be way more terrible than their website counterparts, so I just use those. That would still be true on Linux.

The fact that if there’s a bug in the chrome codebase it affects so many apps. For two years this has been the bane of my existence: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/9413.

When I switched from dual 1440p monitors to dual 4K monitors, all the sudden chrome and every electron app started to just randomly not draw parts of itself. Fixed in chrome ages ago, but electron still hasn’t taken the patch. For awhile if you didn’t have windows scaled up to 4K it was mostly fine, now it does it all the time for me. Spotify, VS Code, etc. are all unusable unless you disable GPU acceleration which makes them run very slow and hog your CPU. And then the memory consumption! VS Code eats more ram than visual studio proper. What’s up with that?

It's slow, it's bloated, and it is so incredibly memory hungry.

Cross-platform is really so over-rated. The Linux diehards aren't that numerous, and if you're down to just Windows and Mac, there are better options. I personally think it's idiotic to try to reuse the same UI across real computers and phones/tablets, so there goes the other leg of the cross-platform story.

Bloat?

I have MS Teams and VS Code, both Electron apps, open and they seem perfectly OK to me - in fact I am surprised by how little memory they use.

That's because Electron has conditioned you to enormous waste of memory, and cpu, bigger latencies, and so on.

The "[surprising] little memory they use" is huge for what they do.

Well, Teams is using less memory than Skype for Business that I also have running and compared to Visual Studio and multiple browsers windows I have open they are hardly using anything.

Edit: Yes, I think Electron/nodejs are "bloated" too if I look in node_modules - but once I stopped worrying about that I got over the whole "bloated" perception.

Ive never had the experience of teams feeling like it was performing well or felt fast. It's probably the laggiest apps in the Office suite.

You've never experienced Skype for Business, it's awfully slow when doing simple things (resizing the window, opening a new conversation, sending a message, etc.)

oh i have. im not saying skype was better, but parts of its UI were absolutely more responsive.

it wasnt slow scrolling up the conversation to see what someone said 10 minutes ago. try scrolling up a teams conversation to find a recent message.

I have a directory open and edit a 260 line file.

roughly 750MB RAM...

> People used to fret about emacs being "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"

People used to edit code on a 1 MIPS 8MB 32BIT DEC VAX 11/780.

With 30 people doing the same, concurrently.

> I'm running all this stuff on a beefy desktop - I don't really care if it takes 200MB RAM to open a file as VC Code has lots of features I really like.

I have a bunch of machines. From ARM boards, ARM-based gadgets, Intel-based ultra-light laptop to a beefy Intel-based desktop.

If a tool runs a text editor editing a small file in 3/4 GB RAM, what will it do if the technology is used to develop some actually demanding things?

That's a narrow view point. You as a developer have a "beefy" desktop. What about your users? Most people in the world don't have "beefy" desktops. These days, 2GB and 4GB machines are still the norm.

I don't expect end users to have VS Code or VS Studio and things are tested in end-user appropriate environments? I don't see what development tools and target environments have to do with each other - 'bloat' in the latter does not necessarily mean bloat in the deliverable?

Edit: I've worked with people in my career who complained about 'bloat' in C (vs assember), C++ (vs C), Unix, Emacs (vs vi), Java (vs C++)

Complaining about the latest round of tools being bloated is just what a subset of the developer community does at any moment in time (and this is not necessarily a bad thing).

But developers do expect them to run the crapware that they "develop", such as Slack, Spotify, etc., which are often worse than VSCode. Neither should be acceptable.

> I've worked with people in my career who complained about 'bloat' in C (vs assember), C++ (vs C), Unix, Emacs (vs vi), Java (vs C++)

That's a big hyperbole.

I don't find that VS Code does much out of the box that I couldn't do with Geany or Notepad++. It's all in the plugins for any of these text editors. VS Code is probably the most performant Electron app I've ever seen, but it's floor is about 10x the native apps, because it has a whole damned sand-boxed browser running in it.