• crispy_kilt@feddit.de
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      9 months ago

      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.

      • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        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.

        • dan@upvote.au
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          9 months ago

          The hate on Lemmy of electron is a bit of an overreaction if you ask me

          The issue is mainly developers using Electron when things like React Native and Flutter exist. I don’t know a lot about Flutter, but React Native uses native UI widgets and feels a lot nicer than Electron.

        • crispy_kilt@feddit.de
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          9 months ago

          Rust is infinitely easier to maintain than mountains of untyped js garbage libraries built upon left pad

        • John Richard@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Let me get this right… you’re complaining about Chromium, but you use Slack? You do realize Chromium had better Linux support for things like HW-accelerated decoding than Firefox? Also, the Chromium sandbox is superior to Firefox.

          • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            I realize Firefox business practices aren’t total garbage for humanity and that they are constantly working to improve it on like .1% budget of Google. And that they are the only real competition which keeps us in a situation where we actually have a choice in browsers. So yeah let’s only care about the technical aspects, or something

            • John Richard@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              And that they are the only real competition which keeps us in a situation where we actually have a choice in browsers.

              That isn’t true. You’ve got WebKit-based browsers, LadyBird/LibWeb/LibJs, Goanna, and others. Why choose Mozilla to lead the efforts, when another open source community/foundation may be better? You can also participate in the various new web specifications yourself too if you’re not happy with the direction they’re headed.

              • myxi@feddit.nl
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                9 months ago

                They said competition, not alternatives. As things are right now, and knowing people, not just trying to make a technical point, Firefox is the only competition.

                • John Richard@lemmy.world
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                  9 months ago

                  What do you think alternatives are exactly? Firefox has what, 3‒5% usage across all platforms? What did Mozilla do to fix that other than exploring Pocket, a iOS only Password app, and now reselling a crippled VPN & email/phone relay? At some point, people will have to move on from anything Mozilla-owned. Want a better browser, then find a community you can donate to that is focusing on building a better browser. It’s time to take off the rose-colored glasses.

          • Pantherina@feddit.de
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            9 months ago

            Chromium had better Linux support for things like HW-accelerated decoding than Firefox?

            Source? Experienced the exact opposite, especially on Wayland.

            • John Richard@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              You can track the bug history here:

              https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1751363

              You can see here Chromium had support for this for several years prior:

              https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/log/PKGBUILD?h=chromium-vaapi

              Android being based on Linux prob has something to do with Chromium’s strong Linux support, but Mozilla has consistently prioritized Windows/Mac. Despite it still be challenging, building Chromium from source has always been a lot easier IMO than trying to create a custom build of Firefox.

              Regardless, when it comes to privacy, Chromium itself is pretty stripped down and has policy-based integrations that put it on par with Firefox in terms of security. Even with Firefox, you’d have to modify quite a few policies to improve security. Tor/Mullvad Browser though do a better job in many ways and there is no equal to those privacy enhancements on Chromium that I know of, unless you’re using something like GrapheneOS.

              Point being, people like to complain about Chromium a lot & act like Apple fan bois for Firefox, when in reality privacy is nearly the same with both with some minor configurations.

              • TarantulaFudge@lemmy.ml
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                9 months ago

                What the heck are you talking about? Chromium is one of the hardest packages to build and it takes forever. Firefox has FAR fewer dependencies. Chromium’s privacy enhancements are a joke.

                • John Richard@lemmy.world
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                  9 months ago

                  You should go tell that to the maintainers of GrapheneOS, which is known as the most secure mobile OS… which uses a custom Chromium build, because of Chromium’s superior sandboxing.

              • Pantherina@feddit.de
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                9 months ago

                Chromium is not stripped down at all, just use googerteller and see. It contacts Google everywhere, on the password list, on the account list, in some settings pages, and just randomly sometimes.

                It is very crazy. And also it is not fingerprint resistant at all.

                I am using all flag settings, policies and GUI settings possibly existing and it still is like that. So no, it is not the same privacy-wise.

                • John Richard@lemmy.world
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                  9 months ago

                  Oh really, what policies are you using? Cause my Firefox does all the same things you mention regarding calling Mozilla services for all sorts of things, including telemetry. Oh, and it isn’t fingerprint resistant either… so please, share what you’re doing.

                  • Pantherina@feddit.de
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                    9 months ago

                    For Firefox I am either using Librewolf or Arkenfox user.js

                    But as Librewolf has a good CI/CD system I think I will switch to that. Problem is they are not active at all, while the arkenfox guy is very active.

                    For Chromium I use the secureblue policies in /usr/etc/chromium/policies/managed

      • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
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        9 months ago

        No, one Chrome tab does not eat that much RAM. Yes it is not as good as native, but it is more platform agnostic, and an Electron app does not really go above 300 MB RAM.

    • BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      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.

      • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Slack desktop app is built with electron and works much better than the web app in my experience. So no it’s not actually always that simple.

        • phar@lemmy.ml
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          9 months ago

          It could be that simple. They just hinder their own website to get you to download the app.

          • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            You really believe that? It would be easier for them to maintain only the website, so this really doesn’t make sense to me.

              • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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                9 months ago

                I’m a web developer. I think there’s a misunderstanding here. The person I responded to said that slack purposely made the web version worse than the desktop app, which I’m doubting.

                • LoudWaterHombre@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  9 months ago

                  Yes, how are you doubting that? Is your company not big enough to want to pull users to a specific platform so you have to cripple the others?

                  • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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                    9 months ago

                    Because I have used both versions of slack and they’re almost exactly the same. The desktop version only works better imo because of small factors such as having its own window so it does not get buried in tabs, and the notification options are (or at least were) more robust. Have you not used the two versions?

                    I don’t really understand your comments. Are you implying that there would be an advantage for slack to “cripple” the web version, when they are essentially running probably 99% of the same code in the electron version? They’re never going to get rid of the web version, and if you’ve used slack for ~9 years like I have, you can easily observe they’re actually one of the few app makers out there to make mostly positive changes to their app. They aren’t suddenly going to make the web app shitty.

                    Also, obviously yeah when it makes sense to, app makers in general make the web app version shitty on purpose. Reddit mobile for example. But just because that’s a thing in the world doesn’t mean it is what slack is doing…not sure why you seem to be implying it’s a universal practice.

        • Gallardo994@sh.itjust.works
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          9 months ago

          Slack is one of those apps which lags in a week on any hardware, it might be better than web version but it still sucks ass compared to fucking ICQ clients. Source: using it in the company I work for, for about 7 years already.

          • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            I don’t often have trouble with slack being slow, or buggy. Been using it like 9 years myself. Interesting you’re comparing slack to icq. Are you referring to a current version of icq, or the one that existed in the early 2000s?

            I am not sure I understand comparing an app designed to do video/audio chat seamlessly, threaded conversations, channels, filesharing, plus has dozens of subtle nice features that make for a rich experience and a… Chat app, that worked fine for sending plaintext messages but didn’t really do anything else.

            • Gallardo994@sh.itjust.works
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              9 months ago

              I compare it to qip or similar with voice calling support about 10 years ago. But still, Slack loses to pretty much anything on the market regarding performance, be that Element, Telegram, Skype or even Discord. It literally battles with biggest IDEs lol

        • John Richard@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Now that Chromium has persistent File System Access permission support, what benefit does Electron have over a PWA other than “Native-looking” menu bars?

      • Pantherina@feddit.de
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        9 months ago

        This. Its webapp with more persistent storage maybe. If the Browsers could integrate this, it would be a gamechanger.

        I am also very sure that Chrome preloads google. com to make it seem to “load faster”. Its all just preloading or persistent storage

      • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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        9 months ago

        Yeah, I was dissapointed, but at least it is a controlled browser and not reliant on your normal browser which could change or have malicious extensions

    • gencha@feddit.de
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      9 months ago

      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.

    • tsonfeir@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      There are other options like Tauri that do the same thing as electron, but instead of bundling chromium with the app, it relies on the OS provided web view. It’s also built with Rust, which tends to be faster.

      As an example, Mac would use Safari, Windows would use Edge (chromium), and Linux would likely use WebKitGTK, which is what safari uses.

      By using the default browser, developers save a ton of space—at the risk of compatibility issues, which are very very rare nowadays.

    • Pantherina@feddit.de
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      9 months ago

      Electron runs a core Chromium Browser + NodeJS + a bit more.

      Unlike Chromium itself it is not backwards compatible and removes a ton of things like its sandboxing capabilities.

      I am not sure how it is less secure, but it may use more RAM (also not always but generally yes of course), doesnt allow hardening (unlike android WebView apps) and breaks LD_PRELOAD-ing another memory allocator.

      This is only a big problem in special cases, in general it makes apps strictly dependend on GNU glibc and others, no idea how it works on Alpine or others (that actually try to make a secure system).

      If somebody knows more about security concerns about Electron, please add.