I've largely moved over to lobste.rs for actual technical news. They even have a "vibecoding" tag to let you filter out anything related to coding with LLMs.
Using cross-platform web technology is absolutely a nuanced engineering decision that is the right one for many businesses. What is categorically bad is bundling a standalone browser runtime for every single service, wasting user’s storage and memory when you could just have a website in a browser.
Is there any major browser now that doesn’t support saving websites as apps? Electron is simply a suboptimal and incorrect way of producing web apps.
That decision is easy: do users leave bad reviews for bundling a few hundred MB of Chromium?
Do they leave bad reviews if your app malfunctions due to the system webview behaving differently than the Chromium version you tested with?
Forget about saving websites as apps, no one does that. Not sure if it works on Desktop Safari, it certainly doesn't on iOS Safari. Not even persistent storage is offered for PWAs. Apple likes the billions in AppStore fees they rake in every quarter.
> Much of Hacker News seems to be incapable of understanding the average user doesn't care about memory use at all, beyond a few extreme examples.
They don't care, but they care about their computer being slow because of swapping. While they can't identify the cause and link it to the various Electron apps they're using (Teams, Slack,...) it's obvious for the tech-aware person they complain to.
That's true, but greater efficiency isn't going to sell more software if the users don't know they need it.
At some level in your management chain there's someone who cares about selling more software above all else, and it's your job to do what they want.
I don't like it either, but I've fought against it for too long to my own detriment. I think ICs have a responsibility to deliver quality software regardless of external pressures, but there's only so much you have time to do.
It's funny how folks can't even get that number right. Depending on how much you care to optimize, Electron adds 50 to 80 MB to your application. Those multi hundreds of megabyte apps? Yeah that's not because of electron, that's things like "we couldn't be bothered to actually think about the assets we bundled in". 100 uncompressed 16 bit PNG? Sure why not. 20MB worth of fonts because we don't like the built in ones and no we've never heard of subsetting? Let's go. 50MB worth of .json data files that we couldn't be bothered to gzip first? Who's going to notice!
Electron is way bigger than an app needs to be, of course, but those giant apps that you hate, 250MB just for a health tracker? That's not electron being the problem.
First off, RAM is not app size, and second, the point of having RAM is literally so it's there to be used. Sure, Chrome is absolute nonsense, but Electron is not Chrome, and an Electron app using 300 MB in memory where data needs to be uncompressed and directly accessible when your computer (including your phone) has gigabytes of the stuff to work with is just... irrelevant? That's pretty much pretending there's a problem for the sake of wanting a problem.
And yes, not using electron will use less memory, which is an excellent reason to go "we're not using Electron". But there's a difference between "We want to use as little memory as possible" and "300MB of RAM on a system with 8 gigabytes of the stuff is a problem". The first is an excellent call. The second is nonsense =)
Space on disk, I have plenty. But the Electron version of many apps feels slow, sluggish, and it takes time to open, it takes time for every click to respond, it is the runtime cost what matters the most.
You say it is irrelevant? It makes a computer in 2026 feel just as fast as a computer from 2001, doing similar tasks, while the computer from 2026 is thousands of times faster.
And I definitely run more than one app at the same time.
This 300MB is the bare minimum used by these apps, in my example just an API tester. A simple "chat" app like Teams, Slack, or Discord wasting so many CPU cycles and so much memory is to me something that should feel like collective shame to our profession. Maybe that's why you disagree with me.
Sure, cross-platform frameworks were great. I do think LLMs are changing the game, however. If you have a robust set of tests, it's much easier to maintain native versions of an app, compared to the past.
Is everyone wrong, or is there more to it than you can see from where you stand?
I don't want to spend much time on this comment so I risk not making a sufficient point, but something I notice is that you're appraising the situation from a purely technical point of view. The technical component is just one piece of what makes a whole product. I think Apple is probably a good example: they regularly make decisions that bother the hell out of tech-centered minds.
Apart from the hassle that OSes put in the way of PWAs (intentionally, but that's another topic), a local Node app simply has a different kind of system access compared to a web app.
Most apps won't need these capabilities to function, but they are there, for all purposes good and bad:
- background activities with fewer restrictions
- less restricted file system and sensor access etc
- ...
sure, many app use this for nefarious things.
But real use cases don't need to be sophisticated rendering algorithms or what not.
I think good streaming apps also use these capabilities, for example, for performance.
It would be super cool if somehow SwiftData could translate computed properties of @Model objects into these generated columns via the #Expression macro!
> Unofficial development for the system also continues on the 9front fork, where active contributors provide monthly builds and new functionality. So far, the 9front fork has provided the system Wi-Fi drivers, audio drivers, USB support and built-in game emulator, along with other features.
To be fair drivers for all that existed already but support was very very narrow in terms of variety. e.g. there was wifi support for like one or two cards but handled on a per card basis - kinda hacky. 9front now has a clean portable wifi interface that spans all the architectures so the Pi and PC have the same wifi infrastructure despite having different interfaces and chips. Same with PCI, it was refactored to be portable among all supported platforms, e.g. the Pi 4 and PC.
Another fun New Reddit quirk: on iOS, the un-dismissable “better in the app” popover makes scroll stop working, meaning you can’t scroll up to get the iOS-native “Open in App” toolbar that actually opens the app, so your only option is to click their hand-rolled button that just opens the App Store listing, or reload the page and tap the native “Open in App” button before the popover reappears.
As an opinionated 'power user' type, I've become used to experiencing friction on web 2.0. So for example I sometimes have to make accommodations because my adblocker or user scripts aren't working with a change on a site. I also find myself doing a lot of captchas, because I use a VPN. That's not unexpected: I'm treading an unhappy path, I shouldn't expect my usage to be considered when these changes are made.
But what I find increasingly common is that I run into these kinds of frictions even when I do behave as a normie. So even if I do install the official Reddit app, I'll end up going through the broken flow you've described. Or I'll make an account and be immediately given a shadowban for being a 'bot'. Or I'll see cookie prompts interfere with login prompts interfering with app prompts.
Devs aren't even making things work outside their own setup now.
On iOS this popover breaks scrolling, which is required to show the Chrome URL bar, meaning I have to literally close the Chrome app and reopen it to even navigate to another page. I've taken this as a sign to stop using Reddit entirely.
Its the same on Android now. Just another self inflicted gun shot from reddit. I now actively avoid reddit search results. Its unfortunate. Reddit had some toxic subs but at least you could expect mostly humans participating.
Are you going to write it below my every comment? I've already replied to this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48933050. Also, I don't think either claim in my reply is dependent on who wrote it. You can trivially verify them yourself.
I'll try to mention it once per discussion page in the future. Also, I have not been working at Bluesky for over a year. While I was there, I was working on the client app and not the protocol. In fact, initially I thought the protocol stuff was a bunch of nonsense.
In this case? Social Network protocol scene but generally the open source world (and every other niche interest in existence) has it's own bouts with scene drama.
