I'll be honest: I make a concentrated effort to avoid these apps that are just a website stuffed into a (usually quite gigantic) executable for a number of reasons:
- They always feel sluggish. Animations are jittery. Text input that does things (contextual search for example) jitters and jumps instead of smoothly performing it's task.
- Scrolling, especially scrolling that loads content, is also often jittery and laggy, if it doesn't just stop working abruptly and require a reload.
- I can't help but feel it's incredibly unnecessary for these apps to be as MASSIVE as they are. Usually several hundred megabytes at a go. I know storage is cheap these days but I own several games on steam that aren't that pudgy on the disk.
I just don't like them. Every time I download a new app and I realize it's electron or node or react or whatever the new shiny framework is everyone likes, I will remove it unless I absolutely 100% need it to perform a task. And I will likely be groaning and complaining the entire time as I listen to my PC clock up it's fans to deal with running 150MB of bloody javascript to show it's UI.
I know this is largely a me problem, I'm aware of that. But I just don't like them. And especially given that a whole lot of these apps aren't built by scrappy underdog devs but massive firms that could extremely easily afford native developers... I dunno. It rubs me the wrong way.
Like I don't know how else to say this: If you want to make software, make software. If you want to make websites, make websites. Stop trying to make software out of website tools.
- They always feel sluggish. Animations are jittery. Text input that does things (contextual search for example) jitters and jumps instead of smoothly performing it's task.
- Scrolling, especially scrolling that loads content, is also often jittery and laggy, if it doesn't just stop working abruptly and require a reload.
- I can't help but feel it's incredibly unnecessary for these apps to be as MASSIVE as they are. Usually several hundred megabytes at a go. I know storage is cheap these days but I own several games on steam that aren't that pudgy on the disk.
I just don't like them. Every time I download a new app and I realize it's electron or node or react or whatever the new shiny framework is everyone likes, I will remove it unless I absolutely 100% need it to perform a task. And I will likely be groaning and complaining the entire time as I listen to my PC clock up it's fans to deal with running 150MB of bloody javascript to show it's UI.
I know this is largely a me problem, I'm aware of that. But I just don't like them. And especially given that a whole lot of these apps aren't built by scrappy underdog devs but massive firms that could extremely easily afford native developers... I dunno. It rubs me the wrong way.
Like I don't know how else to say this: If you want to make software, make software. If you want to make websites, make websites. Stop trying to make software out of website tools.