The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)
The technological change is following the changes in the nature of software development.<p>Perhaps the most important one is the wide-spread contamination with the poisonous mix of VC money with the start-up &quot;move fast and break things&quot; mentality. Notice how the arguments pro Electron always include speed of development, speed of deployment, etc. (dev-focused) and the counter-arguments include performance, usability, etc.  (user-focused). Using Electron is mainly beneficial for the developers - they don&#x27;t need to have so much experience, there&#x27;s plenty of JS developers available, they don&#x27;t need to try hard.<p>Another one is the voracity for control and captive user bases. Nowhere does it become more clear that one has no say in the direction a piece of software is going than when using a web app. Today when you load the app the menu&#x27;s on top, tomorrow it&#x27;s hidden on the left, next week you&#x27;re part of an A&#x2F;B test and so on. Enjoy the ride and consider yourself lucky if you can at least export your data.<p>On the native side, both Apple and Google have tried hard (and succeeded) to reduce the value of software to about 1 EUR. This has led to bogus subscription models and an extreme proliferation of ads and tracking. Microsoft have gone crazy years ago and made a complete mess of their desktop offering - one wouldn&#x27;t know what to develop in even if they wanted to build a native application. And most Windows apps have such mediocre looks, that an Electron app may even be an upgrade. :-)<p>Finally, the thing that bothers me the most - way too many developers are working on building an online public image, an attractive GitHub profile (and it has to be GitHub), a following. We&#x27;re in the era of performative software development. The peacocking and the drama reserved for the silliest of the artistic domains are now firmly entrenched in the online world of software development. What the front-end development community lacks in experience and common sense more than makes up for in numbers and willingness to quarrel.<p>Here&#x27;s something funny in closing: the Nylas Mail project mentioned in the article has been meanwhile abandoned. But apparently one of the orignal authors created a fork called Mailspring. Directly quoted from the first paragraph of the  GitHub README:<p>&quot;It replaces the JavaScript sync code in Nylas Mail with a new C++ sync engine based on Mailcore2. It uses roughly half the RAM and CPU of Nylas Mail and idles with almost zero &quot;CPU Wakes&quot;, which translates to great battery life. It also has an entirely revamped composer and other great new features.&quot;<p>There&#x27;s an elegance and beauty to the raw power of a program running natively on the CPU that a bumbling hippo like Electron can never dream of. Commercial software development always had a survival of the fittest aspect to it, but now we&#x27;re stuck in a local optimum where mediocre but easier to develop solutions are able to evolve fast enough and make enough money or draw enough of a community to survive and thrive - at least until the VC money runs out or the devs get tired of the clumsiness of the hippo.