I think that having just one common ui system makes a lot of sense. We want web apps to work as well as Native applications, and vise-versa.

I support the concept of Electron, but my question is - exactly why is it so bloated? Doesn’t it come with a built-in Chromium? Why is that? Wouldn’t it make more sense if it used the machine’s default browser engine? You would need to look out for different browser versions, but we are already doing that for the web anyways.

If not that... then maybe a single electron-specific chromium engine that is shared across electron apps.

On Windows that currently means MSHTML which, depending on your OS version means some variant of IE. Not even Microsoft pages support IE properly anymore. Also, bloated here tends to mean runtime cost, RAM and CPU use, not disk use which is what you are solving for. Some browsers are definitely worse than others in this respect but running several instances of a full browser stack is not exactly light for any of the major browser engines.

> We want web apps to work as well as Native applications

This is fundamentally impossible.

That’s not what I mean, really. Chrome book already has a non-negligible market share. Practically everything is a “web app” already. Sure, there are going to be use cases for lower level native software, but in reference to Electron I think it’s obvious that we are better off getting things to run better in the first place. Obviously Browsers weren’t originally designed to work this way, but it’s just how things have turned out. And developers are very familiar with html/css/JavaScript.

But of course getting the major browsers to play along has always been slow Microsoft as mentioned already.

But I understand why it makes sense to skip Electron in its current state

Why?

Not the parent, but I suppose he is referring to the fact that it’s another layer of indirection, and solve different problems.

It’s akin to saying “we want C to work as well as ASM”, which is kind of like comparing apples to oranges.

Well, it seems that they each had leaders which the projects depended too much upon (except for maybe Google Glass). But it is always easy to blame leadership when things go wrong, and praise them when things go well. Still, I think that if there was competent executive oversight, like just one other person, then that person probably would have stepped in when things were going in the wrong direction.

As entrepreneurs the only way to learn are either through our own experience or those of others. Of course this is an interdisciplinary subject, and so other domain knowledge is perhaps most important. But how do we become better at entrepreneurship then? It is especially difficult because it is almost impossible to differentiate accounts that are true from those that are fabricated to suit some marketing purpose. We should learn from the accounts depicted here, but it really isn't enough. When we only have accurate coverage of the extremes of failures/successes, we end up with a distorted view of how things work. It would be great to see more rigorous formal studies being done more consistently, so we can take the same approach to learning that we have in other disciplines.