zlacker

>>meetpa+(OP)
It is baffling how these AI companies, with billions of dollars, cannot build native applications, even with the help of AI. From a UI perspective, these are mostly just chat apps, which are not particularly difficult to code from scratch. Before the usual excuses come about how it is impossible to build a custom UI, consider software that is orders of magnitude more complex, such as raddbg, 10x, Superluminal, Blender, Godot, Unity, and UE5, or any video game with a UI. On top of that, programs like Claude Cowork or Codex should, by design, integrate as deeply with the OS as possible. This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron.

>>Olympi+EJ
- Video games often use HTML/JS-based UI these days.

- UE5 has its own custom UI framework, which definitely does not feel "native" on any platform. Not really any better than Electron.

- You can easily call native APIs from Electron.

I agree that Electron apps that feel "web-y" or hog resources unnecessarily are distasteful, but most people don't know or care whether the apps they're running use native UI frameworks, and being able to reassign web developers to work on desktop apps is a significant selling point that will keep companies coming back to Electron instead of native.

>>rafram+VL
I have been building Desktop apps with Go + Wails[1]. I happen to know Go, but if you are ai-coding even that is not necessary.

A full fledged app, that does everything I want, is ~ 10MB. I know Tauri+Rust can get it to probably 1 MB. But it is a far cry from these Electron based apps shipping 140MB+ . My app at 10MB does a lot more, has tons of screens.

Yes, it can be vibe coded and it is especially not an excuse these days.

[1] https://wails.io/

Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Slack, Spotify? Cursor? VsCode? I have like 10 copies of Chrome in my machine!

>>harikb+FO
I've looked into Tauri and Wails, but they don't seem realistic for a cross-platform app with wide distribution across multiple platforms and platform versions.

One of Electron's main selling points is that you control the browser version. Anything that relies on the system web view (like Tauri and Wails) will either force you to aggressively drop support for out-of-date OS versions, or constantly check caniuse.com and ship polyfills like you're writing a normal web app. It also forces you to test CSS that touches form controls or window chrome on every supported major version of every browser, which is just a huge pain. And you'll inevitably run into bugs with the native -> web glue that you wouldn't hit with Electron.

It is absolutely wasteful to ship a copy of Chrome with every desktop app, but Tauri/Wails don't seem like viable alternatives at the moment. As far as I can tell, there aren't really any popular commercial apps using them, so I imagine others have come to the same conclusion.

>>rafram+HR
Yes, but most people don’t do that. Companies are optimizing to ship features fast, not trying to min/max resource usage when majority don’t care.

This is a new era where “if it works more or less well, ux/dx is fine, let’s ship it” has more moat than ever. Everything else is really secondary.