• crispy_kilt@feddit.de
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        8 months ago

        It’s basically Chrome. It’s not a real application, it’s a website pretending to be one. It uses a metric fuckton of RAM and eats your battery faster than Prince Andrew a minor.

        • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          If Firefox could allow their engine to be packaged like this I’d use it. The problem I see here is chromium. Everything is a trade off and we need more ways to build maintainable cross platform applications.

          Slack, for example, is Electron and it runs great. One of the best apps I’ve used. And it works better than the browser version…

          The hate on Lemmy of electron is a bit of an overreaction if you ask me. Yeah it uses more ram than is necessary but again everything is a trade off. Not everything can be a hard to maintain rust app. Let’s try to embrace cross platform solutions, though yes fuck chrome/google, so sure criticize that part of it.

          • dan@upvote.au
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            8 months ago

            The hate on Lemmy of electron is a bit of an overreaction if you ask me

            The issue is mainly developers using Electron when things like React Native and Flutter exist. I don’t know a lot about Flutter, but React Native uses native UI widgets and feels a lot nicer than Electron.

          • crispy_kilt@feddit.de
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            8 months ago

            Rust is infinitely easier to maintain than mountains of untyped js garbage libraries built upon left pad

          • John Richard@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Let me get this right… you’re complaining about Chromium, but you use Slack? You do realize Chromium had better Linux support for things like HW-accelerated decoding than Firefox? Also, the Chromium sandbox is superior to Firefox.

            • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              I realize Firefox business practices aren’t total garbage for humanity and that they are constantly working to improve it on like .1% budget of Google. And that they are the only real competition which keeps us in a situation where we actually have a choice in browsers. So yeah let’s only care about the technical aspects, or something

              • John Richard@lemmy.world
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                8 months ago

                And that they are the only real competition which keeps us in a situation where we actually have a choice in browsers.

                That isn’t true. You’ve got WebKit-based browsers, LadyBird/LibWeb/LibJs, Goanna, and others. Why choose Mozilla to lead the efforts, when another open source community/foundation may be better? You can also participate in the various new web specifications yourself too if you’re not happy with the direction they’re headed.

                • myxi@feddit.nl
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                  8 months ago

                  They said competition, not alternatives. As things are right now, and knowing people, not just trying to make a technical point, Firefox is the only competition.

                  • John Richard@lemmy.world
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                    8 months ago

                    What do you think alternatives are exactly? Firefox has what, 3‒5% usage across all platforms? What did Mozilla do to fix that other than exploring Pocket, a iOS only Password app, and now reselling a crippled VPN & email/phone relay? At some point, people will have to move on from anything Mozilla-owned. Want a better browser, then find a community you can donate to that is focusing on building a better browser. It’s time to take off the rose-colored glasses.

            • Pantherina@feddit.de
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              8 months ago

              Chromium had better Linux support for things like HW-accelerated decoding than Firefox?

              Source? Experienced the exact opposite, especially on Wayland.

              • John Richard@lemmy.world
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                8 months ago

                You can track the bug history here:

                https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1751363

                You can see here Chromium had support for this for several years prior:

                https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/log/PKGBUILD?h=chromium-vaapi

                Android being based on Linux prob has something to do with Chromium’s strong Linux support, but Mozilla has consistently prioritized Windows/Mac. Despite it still be challenging, building Chromium from source has always been a lot easier IMO than trying to create a custom build of Firefox.

                Regardless, when it comes to privacy, Chromium itself is pretty stripped down and has policy-based integrations that put it on par with Firefox in terms of security. Even with Firefox, you’d have to modify quite a few policies to improve security. Tor/Mullvad Browser though do a better job in many ways and there is no equal to those privacy enhancements on Chromium that I know of, unless you’re using something like GrapheneOS.

                Point being, people like to complain about Chromium a lot & act like Apple fan bois for Firefox, when in reality privacy is nearly the same with both with some minor configurations.

                • Pantherina@feddit.de
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                  8 months ago

                  Chromium is not stripped down at all, just use googerteller and see. It contacts Google everywhere, on the password list, on the account list, in some settings pages, and just randomly sometimes.

                  It is very crazy. And also it is not fingerprint resistant at all.

                  I am using all flag settings, policies and GUI settings possibly existing and it still is like that. So no, it is not the same privacy-wise.

                • TarantulaFudge@lemmy.ml
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                  8 months ago

                  What the heck are you talking about? Chromium is one of the hardest packages to build and it takes forever. Firefox has FAR fewer dependencies. Chromium’s privacy enhancements are a joke.

        • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
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          8 months ago

          No, one Chrome tab does not eat that much RAM. Yes it is not as good as native, but it is more platform agnostic, and an Electron app does not really go above 300 MB RAM.

      • BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Each electron App is actually a full independent chromium browser install running a website. It’s easy to code for and works cross platform as a result, but it’s essentially just a website, although they can run offline depending on what’s been built in to the local app.

        Each electron app running on your system is a separate full chromium app running, with no sharing of resources between each instance. So they take up a lot of space each and duplicate all the resource usage, and potentially the security flaws.

        • Pantherina@feddit.de
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          8 months ago

          This. Its webapp with more persistent storage maybe. If the Browsers could integrate this, it would be a gamechanger.

          I am also very sure that Chrome preloads google. com to make it seem to “load faster”. Its all just preloading or persistent storage

      • gencha@feddit.de
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        8 months ago

        It’s what you deploy to your users if you want to work around ad blockers and browser extensions. It’s a great tool to get operating system level access to exfiltrate information about your users and identify them uniquely, even if they would prefer that not to happen.

        All that with the help of Google’s telemetry engine aka Chrome, which further helps Alphabet to manifest their interpretation of web standards in the world.

        We worked to move things onto the web. Now people bring the web back to your desktop with every application bringing it’s own browser shell. We have come full circle and we’re now using 10x the resources.

        Electron is the prime example of everything that is wrong in IT.

      • Pantherina@feddit.de
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        8 months ago

        Electron runs a core Chromium Browser + NodeJS + a bit more.

        Unlike Chromium itself it is not backwards compatible and removes a ton of things like its sandboxing capabilities.

        I am not sure how it is less secure, but it may use more RAM (also not always but generally yes of course), doesnt allow hardening (unlike android WebView apps) and breaks LD_PRELOAD-ing another memory allocator.

        This is only a big problem in special cases, in general it makes apps strictly dependend on GNU glibc and others, no idea how it works on Alpine or others (that actually try to make a secure system).

        If somebody knows more about security concerns about Electron, please add.