> it really is the safest approach for most applications.

It's also the option which gives your users by far the worst experience. Not worth it at all, imo.

Not really. The downsides are mostly overblown.

Plenty of category leading applications like Discord, VSCode, Slack, Figma, etc. use it quite successfully.

All of those are examples of overbloated, slow, horrible user experience apps.

Does their market share back up your take of them as horrible apps?

Are there QT or GTK competitors crushing them?

I always hear how terrible electron apps are, but the companies picking electron seem to get traction QT or other apps don't and seem to have a good cross platform story as well.

Users will happily deal with a suboptimal experience as long as there are other things attracting them to the product. That's why Microsoft can do whatever it wants with Windows without worrying their users will run off somewhere else. So if you care more about people than businesses, maybe it shouldn't be an excuse to pick "better dev experience" over the user's.

Beware with that logic. You notice successful electron apps because of how bloated they are. I suspect you use many Qt apps without even noticing.

One that comes to mind that I use daily and noticed only recently that it was implemented in Qt is the telegram desktop app.

They said horrible user experience apps, not horrible apps. You can still deliver an app with a horrible user experience and build a profitable business. Ever done an expense report?

Companies aren't picking Electron due to inherent shortcomings in other platforms, they're picking it because it's easier (and cheaper) to find JavaScript devs who can get up to speed with it quickly.

Discord, VS Code, and Figma are all apps that individuals choose and are well liked despite many alternatives. Slack too I think, though I don’t have experience with it.

Your comment applies to Teams and I’m sure other electron apps. But the sweeping generalization that electron apps have terrible user experiences is pretty obviously incorrect.

Oh yes, the great old "works for me". On a yesterday's supercomputer, I presume? I live in a "developing" (have doubts it's really developing) country, most people are running laptops with no more than 8 GiB of RAM (sometimes it's 4 or less), and all this Electron nonsense is running like molasses, especially if you're trying to use a computer like a proper computer and do multitasking.

And most of the world is like that, very few of us (speaking globally) have $2k to drop on a new supercomputer every few years to run our chat applications.

Hey, I found CEO of Discord

All of those I avoid using due to their slowness. I can notice text-input lag in vscode ffs!

> Qt also seems to be a good option

I think Qt really is 'just' missing more language bindings, and a better hot reload story for more people to use it. Lots of devs (specially Free Software devs) would prefer to use native toolkits, if the prototyping experience was similar to how Vite is for web frontend stuff, I think Qt would be used a lot more.

They are building more language bindings to back QML frontends

https://www.qt.io/qt-bridges

Thanks for sharing. I hope that initiative goes well. And again, integration with whatever solution the language has for hot reloading is a must these days for UI development.

>As wrong as it feels to have to use Electron for a desktop app, it really is the safest approach for most applications.

> Qt also seems to be a good option, though there are licensing considerations for commercial applications.

you need to respect the LGPL with Qt. You also need to with Electron which uses Chromium which is LGPL.

For what value of “safest”?