I often see people talking about the fact that they like a certain open-source application, but ‘it’s a shame it’s on Electron’; what does this mean? Is it a privacy thing or a resource thing?

  • Echedenyan@lemmy.ml
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    3 years ago

    Electron is a framework for desktop development based on Chromium.

    It has a big part of Chromium as part of its code but with a wrapper layer to act as a framework.

    With it, you can make desktop apps with PWA (Progressive Web Apps).

    They like some of it because you can get the beauty of CSS and JS effects in a desktop app, but for every of these apps you end running an independent instance of Chromium.

    It doesn’t use system browser engine or one from the installed browsers. Every app you install using it is exactly the same as installing Chrome or Chromium in different folders at your PC and running them at the same time.

    This is why they blame it too.