Flash and other similar alternatives are relics from the 20th century and have no place in a modern web browser IMHO. Whatever functionality they served which is still missing from the HTML standard needs to be incorporated, where it makes sense.

IIRC, the Atom Editor (where Electron sprung out from) was first built for MacOS.
And Macs apparently have a large market share among web devs.

So Electron and Macs pretty much go together.

The amount of rage I get inside me each time I discover a supposedly desktop application is just Electron and not actually native, argh! I halt adoption and hold a grudge. Shitty development [and worse performance] shouldn't be rewarded with use.

And now there's crap trying to do node.js "native", too. Adobe's the big one I've seen doing that. Not that I'd EVER accuse Adobe of being competent at anything.

Flash and Electron do have a key difference.

Flash was a browser plugin; you would install it because a web site asked you to, and then Flash content would *automatically* run whenever you accessed the web page. This, of course, would be abused by many web developers, using it when plain HTML would suffice (and making the web site inaccessible on devices that didn't have Flash installed), and even being used for ads. One key point is that the user usually does not explicitly consent to using Flash when it's used.

Electron, on the other hand, is a stand-alone framework for developing apps. An Electron app is a separate app, not part of the browser; it just happens to embed its own copy of Chromium. As a result, using an Electron app is more like using a native app, and the user explicitly has to download and execute said app. Hence, the user is essentially consenting to the use of the app when they run it.

Another difference: Electron is open source, Flash is not.

In general, I would not expect Electron apps to perform worse (or better) than Web apps, except for the added memory/storage of another Chromium instance. From the app developer's perspective, Electron is basically a way to port a web app to "native", or to develop a "native" app using web technologies, allowing the app to do things that a web app would not be allowed to do (like access the file system). For example, something like Etcher (which allows writing disk images to physical disks) would not work as a web app, but it works with Electron. (Many of the complaints about Electron are not as much of an issue for an infrequently used program like Etcher than they would be for apps that are more heavily used, like Slack, Discord, and Atom/VSCode (the latter being apparently decently optimized).)

As a sort of converse technology, I could mention WebAssembly and emscripten, which allows desktop apps to be ported to the Web. You can take a C program, compile it to WASM, and then embed it in a web page; even things like SDL are supported. Counter-point: For less used apps, the effect of Electron on the planet is outweighed by the savings of developer time for writing the app. This is especially true if the app is already a web page, or if you happen to have web developers around, but not desktop app developers. (There are some major differences between the two; they even use different languages!)

Dude, I don't understand the activism there.

Sure, Electron will consume more resources on your device than an extremely lean native GUI app, but you got a lot of other things that consume way more resources.

Any AAA game will consume way more resources than your typical electron apps. Should we get rid of those?

How about those fancy resource-hungry IDEs like IntelliJ? Java with all that RAM? Scripting language running significantly slower than compiled language? I hope you are not running a bloated OS like Windows, MacOS or Ubuntu right?

How about the cloud? All those vms when you could be running on bare metal...

Yeah, I know what will happen:

- We'll all buy our physical servers, collocated them in data centers, we'll install Alpine Linux on them and of course we'll code all our hosted apps in C.

- Then, we'll change all user OSes to use the leanest usable os possible (not MacOS or Windows, probably some variant of Linux).

- Of course, we'll force everyone to code all the desktop apps in C as well.

- We'll probably change the web too so that instead of loading web pages, it will load small binaries... that will run a lot faster...

I don't think any of those things make sense, but they would have more of an impact than getting rid of Electron. There is nothing shitty about it. Being a truly competent web developer (especially full stack) takes a lot of work.

Things move at a truly insane pace and its hard to keep up.

I would not expect someone investing all this time keeping up to date to also be a virtuoso with native apps, especially cross-platform.

Honestly, I personally find platforms that are super specific (sometimes, downright proprietary) with the tech stack you can use to develop apps on them to be more to blame. Why should developers spend all that mental energy to master only part of the tech stack (the client) for only a fraction of the market? Now, that's a shitty move.

You want devs to spend time making apps that will perform extremely well on your platform? Then stop trying to corner the market with your proprietary gumbo and start integrating existing open technologies and standards.

If you were expecting logic from MacOS, I'm afraid you'll find nothing behind the curtain. Ever since Steve Jobs became the Late, the simple fact of the matter is, there's been no direction for the overarching company. Remember Apple before 1998?

Yeah, it's a lot like that except they've got billions of dollars to burn.