From lived experience, creating a cross-platform application via abstracting the relevant native interfaces versus targeting web with all the _fun_ that entails are effectively equal levels of pain. Developing rich web apps isn’t free either; I needn’t go into the issues surrounding the revolving door of frameworks, contrived state management patterns that seem to change every year, the total lack of standard controls outside of built-in web elements that look awful which inevitably means that at some point, _you will_ have to be doing DOM manipulation for something that is otherwise built-in on an OS’s native toolkit, etc etc. And then when you put all of this together, you add yet another 500MB Chromium instance onto your user’s desktop and the thing feels like a social networking app.
I’m not going to pretend that there’s currently a better solution because for the current set of constraints everything sucks. .NET has a few up-and-coming frameworks for cross-platform UI but nothing mature like WPF was. Java still produces noticeably slow applications. React Native could perhaps get part of the way there, but as far as I’m aware that mostly targets mobile.
Yep, what's missing is a WebView standard for desktop, like Android and iOS provide. Where these apps are a thin wrapper around a system provided browser engine. And let the user choose the engine (gecko, blink, servo, ...).
The concern is not really around disk but memory, opening just a few Electron app instances is enough to bring a machine with 8GB of RAM to its knees. I’m almost convinced that this is some kind of a planned obsolescence plot.
A standard interface for web views would be great, I’d love to force everything onto a consistent version of Gecko, but really we need a new native cross-platform batteries-included framework with controls and layouts for 90% of standard business scenarios.
You can solve that with such a standard. Like when you're selecting the gecko engine it'll always run a Firefox process in the background, serving not just the normal Firefox browser frontend but also these WebViews. Kind of like ChromeOS does it. Of course every app will get it's own isolated browser process, but that's already the case when you open multiple tabs and it performs great.
No you won't, because it will be the same complains from Electron folks that the provided Gecko isn't the version they actually care about, and how testing is soooo hard when caring for anything beyond shipping Chrome with their application.
I’m not going to pretend that there’s currently a better solution because for the current set of constraints everything sucks. .NET has a few up-and-coming frameworks for cross-platform UI but nothing mature like WPF was. Java still produces noticeably slow applications. React Native could perhaps get part of the way there, but as far as I’m aware that mostly targets mobile.