There's a better way - you can find all apps you really should care about, i.e., the ones you have installed locally - run the last script in a comment of the Gist [0].
Update: It appears that the author of shamelectron was influenced by the same Gist [1].
Thanks for the mention! Yes, I was the person who found the original bug in electron and made the PR to get it fixed. Now doing my due diligence of (nicely) asking companies to update their versions :)
What is that? Like 32x >100MB junk overhead per app? ~4GiB gone from the disk just to hold the same broken copy of some framework/library? It's quite the insanity, isn't it?
If there was one copy of that electron (e.g. installed to /Library somewhere) which all apps would simply use then you only would need to update one copy. Less disk space wasted. All apps fixed in one go.
Back in the old days on the Commodore Amiga we would just do that… install some .library to SYS:Libs/ first if a program required it. It's not like this process was so complicated nobody could do it, right?
There is not one Electron. There are multiple, they release a new version every month or so.
Some apps, like VS Code, update very quickly to the latest one. Others more rarely. So now you need to keep multiple shared Electron versions, and track dependencies and who uses what version.
And it's quite likely that everyone of your Electron using apps will be on a different version, so now you are back to square one.
Memory and storage is cheap enough nowadays to not have to deal with the insanity that shared libraries cause. I don’t care if I use 30gb of memory to run a browser and a note taking app.
Some of us do care. Devs should respect users systems more than their own instead of crapping all over them with Electron. I’d almost go as far as to say that it’s evil. Wasting resources, energy, people’s time, and money.
I don't understand why it's all-or-nothing. We know how to version things pretty well these days, why is there no blended solution where libraries are shared but version aware? I don't mind having two different versions of electron on my laptop but I don't want 30 copies of the same version.
The big issue I see with Nix is that it's solving several related & very complex problems, and isn't doing so at a particularly easy level of abstraction. It's a PITA to package software that isn't using an already-supported build system. And mixing versions is messy, instead of just `[ package1="versionA", package2="versionB", …]` sort of thing with a lockfile to convert versions to immutable IDs like commit hashes you have to specify which commits of nixpkgs had each version and then do something like `nixpkgs-versionA=GIT_COMMIT_HASH_A; nixpkgs-versionB=GIT_COMMIT_HASH_B; [ nixpkgs-versionA.package1, nixpkgs-versionB.package2, …]`. There are lots of other "warts" like that, of varying levels of annoyance.
Because in practice nobody has solved it, while everyone claims they have.
In practice every software needs a particular version of a library. Even a minor upgrade to that library might, and will break it. In an idealized world it should not happen, but here we are. In a world that we setup whole containers so that we can run software.
So no. Shared libraries do not work in practice. At all. It should be straightforward, but they just do not work.
No shit. One major frigging selling point of Electron vs OS web view is the developer controls the browser version and has a stable target to develop and test against, rather than having many moving targets that shift after the app is shipped.
And you really think the entire ecosystem has never heard of this honking great idea named shared libraries from the good old days? Being smug about obvious things like this usually just betrays your shallow understanding.
Disclosure: I’ve criticized Electron aplenty. But these are complex tradeoffs and people dismissing them with obvious wins in their minds are clueless.
Disclosure 2: I was once a member of the maintainer team of a major package manager. Shared libraries, oh my, I can tell you horror stories all night long. If your experiences with them are great chances are a team behind the scenes has blocked and/or fixed faulty updates for you and shielded you from most of the issues.
The number of major companies doing half-assed javascript bullshit instead of proper native macOS apps is ridiculous. This did remind me to go cancel 1Password though, something I'd been meaning to do since they switched _to_ electron...
I'm switching away from 1Password as soon as v7 stops working. I use v8 on my work machine and it's a serious downgrade and AgileBits' handling of criticism around it has been just as bad.
Both MS and Apple have screwed up. WinUI3 is simply terrible and SwiftUI is a horrible headache. Is there any wonder that people are mass migrating to web frameworks ?
I find it telling that the original creators of electron are now writing a new editor with native code because even they can’t stand electron. It’s like they are trying to write a wrong they did to the world.
Xcode, Visual Studio (the original I mean), PyCharm et al., Eclipse, vim, emacs, Notepad++, Sublime… hmm that’s all the IDEs and text editors I can remember using significantly in a professional context. I prefer VSCode to those.
compared to... nothing... I love it. It's subjective. I love what it does and it's my favorite piece of software because it does what i need it to do, every time, all the time.
Hey - "Shame" is somewhat stronger than what I would have said but I also had similar feelings considering it was from DHH's company. And not just for outdated Electron, but for shipping Electron in the first place. For some reason I always felt DHH will write native apps for his company :)
I have absolutely lost hope from Dropbox and I am actively looking for a replacement.
BitWarden using Electron is just unfortunate and it is sluggish.
What happened to 1Password (don't use it, never did) and their Apple only-great-native-software trope I used to hear? Cost cutting?
Electron is the reason I am still using Overcast and not Pocket Casts even though it's FOSS.
Proton Mail - this app is such a mess!
Simplenote - moved away long back! When did Electron come into it? It was native, wasn't it?
> What happened to 1Password (don't use it, never did) and their Apple only-great-native-software trope I used to hear? Cost cutting?
They started chasing B2B/corporate, and as part of that switched their desktop app over to Electron and replaced the old UI of 7 with a generic flat blobby SaaS type design. They lost their botique app shop feel and now blend in with the usual greasy SaaS fare.
Update: It appears that the author of shamelectron was influenced by the same Gist [1].
[0]: https://gist.github.com/tkafka/e3eb63a5ec448e9be6701bfd1f1b1...
[1]: https://gist.github.com/tkafka/e3eb63a5ec448e9be6701bfd1f1b1...