• crispy_kilt@feddit.de
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      3 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.

    • BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world
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      3 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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        3 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

      • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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        3 months ago

        Yeah, I was dissapointed, but at least it is a controlled browser and not reliant on your normal browser which could change or have malicious extensions

    • gencha@feddit.de
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      3 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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      3 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.