Like I said, I’m not arguing that many apps are built as electron apps when they’re just glorified web apps. Though I’m neutral on whether that’s a bad thing or not. I’m definitely against apps being built with electron that don’t really have UIs, defeating the entire point of electron and friends…

VSCode is another example you’re missing. And they have put a LOT of work into making as many features available in the web-version as possible, the feature parity isn’t an accident.

Or Obsidian.

Examples aside, you might be surprised by applications you may not think of as not using native features, that rely heavily on them, expecting to be executing in a Node environment and not a browser one. Especially on the networking and process side. Browsers are extremely restrictive.

What are you talking about…? Please re-read my comment above :/

An electron app is a natjve application that renders a browser based UI. You appear to be conflating the browser-based UI with the whole “native application” thing.

It comes with all the advantages a native application does, like having hardware access, working natively offline, working with the filesystem, interfacing with the OS and installed OS packages, being able to use other native binaries, being able to use more native networking capabilities…etc

Sure lots of electron applications that people make could just be a web app, I’m not arguing that.

I am, however, pointing out that you are grossly incorrect that electron (and all other technologies like it, we’re not really just talking about electron here) is 'just a web app". It’s a native application server and a web-based UI, which means I can write an application in C# with all of the .Net advantages, with a web UI, that runs natively on your device for example.

This lets me ship a product much faster than if I was going to build that UI in QT or GTK, with a significantly upgraded user experience that is consistent across all platforms.

It’s absolutely mind boggling that the bar for election is “supports a free and fair election”, and we’ve reached that stage in such a short time.

The death spiral is a steep one.

I have a PC I built a year and a half ago and apparently it “doesn’t meet the requirements” for windows 11…

Ryzen 5 5600x and a 3060 TI.

In public repositories*

It’s an interesting view but it seems like the metrics themselves may be pretty error-prone with biases, and definitely cannot be used to draw conclusions.

Which is… Also a real desktop app. This shallow take is getting incredibly old, and doesn’t even contribute to actual valuable discussion… If you don’t see the value in this being shipped, then why try and tear the value down for others?

I main C#, and even I would rather build cross platform full applications with electron than any of the other options available. I’m definitely choosing it over QT or gtk. Why? Because I can actually ship the project with all the necessary features, in good time, and bake in a great user experience.

That’s the difference here. Practical problems vs reality. Shipping the project & features vs not.

Yes, there are many successful applications not built with electron, ofc there are, that’s not my point. My point is that the productivity difference is such that it’s the difference between not building the thing vs building it and successful shipping it to users. You can argue and shit on the difference, but at the end of the day the above is what really matters.

I don’t think that’s how it works, and is a pretty toxic and non-constructive way to look at this.

I’ve played around with this a few times now and I talked about getting a trench coat for a good day with my wife and now I just won’t stop getting ads for long coats…

Honestly it’s ridiculously invasive.

Hopefully without the toxic devs?

So… Throw them in jail? Make them accountable? Revoke the companies ability to do business till the records are provided?

Then again, that’s just fantasy because the laws don’t matter if you’re Rick/big enough anymore.

Incredibly easy to miss, damn.

Really, victim blaming?

Get out of here with that low quality crap.

That’s kinda the root is the problem though isn’t it?

It’s incredible useful to have hoards of intellectually challenged voters hanging off your every lie.

The wrong lesson?

I’m not sure how reducing your attack surface area is the wrong lesson here.

Definitely distopian, corporate power and entrenchment grows every year.

Yeah, it’s technical topics I care about, and have a hard time with in current search engines.

There is so much noise caused by celebrity news, current events, “hot topics”, politics, “top 10” list spam, SEO gaming…etc that searches on Google, bing, and ddg are just frustrating.

This is literally “nuh uh” quality discussion. We get it, you like SearXNG, are you actually trying Kagi?

I just tried a few SearXNG instances and the quality is the same as what I get from Google or Bing anyways.

Trying out Kagi now to see if it’s better or not.

They probably have a lot of potential infrastructure savings. $1/80 searches is an absolutely astronomical cost.

I’m imagining there are quite a few gains they can get by way of optimization, different technologies, and optimizing hot paths to bring that number down.

It really depends how they built this thing. For instance, if they built this on the AWS ecosystem, using more than straight compute/K8, their costs are going to be an actual order of magnitude higher than if they didn’t.

That’d be weird if they couldn’t, there’s no way they can improve their search engine other than by watching the way users use it.

Otherwise it exists in a vacuum.

browsers themselves are easy to make

That’s … a patently false statement.

They are among the most complex, difficult, resource hungry pieces of software out there along with actual operating systems.

There’s a lot of open source browsers out there. Are you using them? Probably not

This is also essentially misinformation. I’m sure none of us have heard of Firefox before, or Chromium. Sure Chrome (closed source) is what most people use, but Firefox isn’t exactly some esoteric browser.