Bearable Electron Apps

Oct 08, 2022 — Reyan Chaudhry

In my journeys throughout both my computer and the internet I have begun to notice a certain resurgence among the more technical (and even fairly average) desktop app audience. More and more people are starting to notice the significant lack of meaningful performance increases in the software they use every day, especially compared to the leaps and bounds that hardware innovation has taken these past decade or so.

If our processors are running 100x faster, if our operating systems have had 10 years to be refined, if developers are getting access to newer and shinier and even more “memory-safe” tools day by day, why does nothing feel any faster? In fact, comparing a modern windows computer to one form 15 years ago running windows 7 or even windows XP you will find that not only is there not a significant increase in snappiness and/or usability, in some instances there's actually a downgrade in those metrics!

This is just a small subset of the problems that end users are facing time and time again; and the largest, most despised perpetrator of said problems is none other than the Electron JavaScript GUI framework–The Hogger of Ram, The Drainer of Batteries, and the Harbinger of Inconsistent UI.

Overdramatic introduction aside, it's no secret how terrible these “Electron Apps” are to both use and tolerate on a daily basis. Hell, even having more than 2 of these abominations running simultaneously on an average computer is enough to stunt is performance. Classic examples include apps like Discord and the new Spark v3.0 Email app, but there is no shortage of the garbage that these web developers feigning as native app devs manage to churn out year after year–and honestly it's prevalence should be a shame to the greater software engineering community. Of course, I understand the application of Electron for prototyping, but shipping out full fledged, bug ridden, and downright slow desktop apps—sometimes even for a PRICE—should be unacceptable...

On the other hand...

Despite all of this, however, there are a few Electron apps that manage to provide impressive usability with adequate performance. Although I believe that all of these would be better off as Native solutions, it's hard not to commend the developers for somehow managing to develop actual decent software in such a terrbile, bandage and flex-seal ridden cesspool of an ecosystem.

Sure, they still don't have truly native and/or performant fit and finish, nor they they integrate correctly with things I'd like them to, but they get the job done and do it better than most competitors that I can think of (though usually through brute force of userbase).

I'd like to mention some of these apps as a sort of podium for other aspiring JavaScript teams to use as a baseline for anything that they believe can only be made in Electron...

1Password 8

Although my first pick here is sure to cause some controversy for the HN-type vaultwarden shilling crowd, it's one that I will stick by. I've been a fairly long-time subscriber to 1Password—ever since I got tired of Bitwarden's insufferable quirks—and got to use version 7 for quite some time before the release of the latest, and electron-based release. Without a doubt the electron version is barely a downgrade and actually has a suite of features that make it far more user-friendly than 1Password 7, which frankly had a pretty goofy main window UI (quite modified from native I will admit) and a borderline frustrating “Mini” window that gave me way more headaches than I would've liked.

The new version has Universal Autofill and a quite nice spotlight-like database searching feature, and overall runs much smoother than the last. Although the frontend isn't native, AgileBits has gone to almost obsessive lengths (Rust backend, agressive performance regression testing) to make sure that you don't miss out on much; it has great UI parity with the rest of macOS and even respects the user's choice of accent color (graphite!!!). Furthermore, the App's ram usage—in the testing that I've done, at least— has remained about the same, if not a little less than before! The app also does database searches much quicker and has never, and I mean never, felt sluggish anytime that I've used it, and my vault has more than 300 items of varying categories!

And to complete my point, the client is the same on Linux/Windows and also remains native (SwiftUI + Rust) on iOS, on which it is honestly a pleasure to use, so my complaints for now remain limited. A lot of people left 1Password after this announcement because it was “Just like BitWarden” now, but I find that to be very far from the truth... It's actually still an upgrade.