I'm legitimately pissed off by this. Electron apps are always annoying to see but this one is genuinely offensive. I hate the culture and ecosystem Electron has allowed to flourish. This project is an insult to computer science.
Embrace the future :)
If you really want a small footprint app, you could build your own electron linked to your locally installed libchromium and locally installed node.js, then you can run the app against your local ffmpeg (from PATH, which is the default behaviour if the bundled ffmpeg is missing). Now it's only a few MB in size.
I find most Electron apps to be well designed, run quickly, can be optimized for efficient power use, and are hassle-free to download and install. They also do not require a lot of the developers time to make something that looks good and builds for my operating system, so they can spend that time on more important things.
I love the culture and ecosystem Electron has allowed to flourish. Anybody with some basic knowledge of installing software packages and some HTML and JavaScript can make an Electron program and share it with their friends. I think that's really cool. It reminds me of my beginning days as a programmer, when I could write a few lines of code (I only knew how to write a few!) and make something interesting that I could show other people. Today I have a career out of that.
Finally, I really do think that your comment is an insult to computer science. Our ability to leverage abstraction so that programming useful things is accessible to a huge number of people is very cool to me. If Electron was wiped off of the face of the earth and never existed, I'd be rather sad at the loss. There are kids out there learning to program using Electron. There are people like me who just kinda prefer a GUI interface to a command line one depending on what they're working with. There is so much good introduced into the world by this thing, and not really any evil.
Your comment, in contrast, seems intended to piss all over a great many peoples hard work. If I was an Electron developer or a Chromium developer, I'd be pretty hurt by this. If I was that person, I'd be thinking every day about how code I wrote was being used to deliver cool applications to folks who might not otherwise have it.
You've not even found exactly one thing to criticize. I don't know what about it pissed you off, because you didn't tell me. I don't know exactly why Electron apps annoy you—they don't annoy me (after all, I can just choose not to use them if I desire). You've expressed hate for a culture and ecosystem that seems to be not your own, but you've given not a hint of an argument as to why that's such a bad thing. Finally, you presume to speak for all of computer scientists and feel INSULTED when the developer did nothing to you to harm you or offend you.
I'm shocked and chilled to the core that a comment of such pure hatred is allowed to just sit here. It must have taken you all of 3 minutes to write that comment and ruin my morning, not to speak of some others who might read this.
> I find most Electron apps to be well designed, run quickly, can be optimized for efficient power use
As long as we're doing personal experiences, I find most Electron apps to be:
1. Poorly designed.
Flow of keyboard control is usually all over the place, as if the developer completely skipped the idea of making the app keyboard accessible. This is the case with even big-name Electron apps with a lot of development effort behind them, like Atom. Sure, it has keyboard shortcuts, for some actions, but that's it. Half the time focus ends up someplace I didn't expect it to, and I have to use a mouse-click to focus. Half of that time, it's the Ctrl-Shift-P popup that misses the keyboard focus.
2. Run slowly.
Slack, Spotify, Atom. All run slowly on my system. Not slowly in the sense they grind to a halt and become unusable (well, Atom does), but slowly compared to native apps. It's noticeable, it's annoying; and in the case of Atom, it's frustrating.
3. Suck battery
OS X's stats are enough to back this up. Chrome is a power hog, and every Electron app is running its own copy of Chromium. Most apps don't bother to do anything towards respecting power efficiency, since it's so easy to just cobble up and app and throw it up. Slack and Atom again, are the examples I chose for this.
VS Code is the only browser-embedded app I know that manages to not be too slow and somewhat respect power consumption. I reckon similar feats cannot be pulled off by a developer spending little time on the code, the kind of developers you talk about.
> Anybody with some basic knowledge of installing software packages and some HTML and JavaScript can make an Electron program and share it with their friends.
That is exactly the kind of thing the web evolved to support. Unfortunately, Electron takes that idea and turns it on its head. While the web didn't require someone to download an entire browser for every individual site, Electron does for every app. That, is my problem with this model (I don't know about your parent commenter).
I agree that Electron apps can be slow. I think that has to do with the single thread event loop, which it is very easy to block when doing some heavy processing, if you don't think about it all the time. On the other hand Electron apps are very stable and I don't think I've ever had one segfault on me, like happens with a lot of native applications. It's still quite early in the world of Electron, so I can imagine speed will increase as people develop new techniques for writing better code for complex apps. Like VS Code probably did something right there.
And for that, you get one hell of a text/layout engine, hardware accelerated 2D/3D graphics, integrated IDE, one the fastest interpreted runtimes around, which happens to be the most popular programing language…
All Open Source, cross platform.
Yeah, insulting indeed. Who needs those damn Electron apps.
>you get one hell of a text/layout engine, hardware accelerated 2D/3D graphics, integrated IDE, one the fastest interpreted runtimes around, which happens to be the most popular programing language…
All so you can provide a graphical interface for two ffmpeg flags.
