Why Electron?¶
There's been significant criticism about the size and the memory footprint of Electron based applications the past years. In fact, there is so much hate going towards this platform, that I feel the need to defend it, since I find it quite useful. I am not saying it’s the perfect solution for everything. Those are legitimate concerns, but as usual, it's all about trade-offs.
The first thing we need to answer though is not about Electron. It’s about web-based applications in general.
So why choose to create a web-based application in the first place?¶
I think a lot of people underestimate the amount of problems that browsers solve these days on our behalf for free. Web is a rich, secure, and extremely accessible platform. We now have APIs that provide access to File System, GPU, Geolocation, IndexedDB, and many many more. The best part is that all of that is cross platform, and the implementation is abstracted away from the developer by the browser. It is also extremely secure, compared to raw hardware access, since every sensitive request needs to be approved by the user.
Creating a decent user interface for a cross platform application is also a huge undertaking. UI frameworks have their cons, but maintaining a single implementation for a consistent UI across multiple operating systems is a big deal. The application might not feel native, but it’s a viable alternative. So many applications are now available on Linux because of that.
Modern Javascript frameworks also help with state management, and a lot of devs are already familiar with them. For our specific case, using a web-app to create SVGs, ensures that what you see while editing, is as close as possible to what you are going to get when you open your creations on a browser. We also don’t have to render anything ourselves, or try to implement quirky conversions.
Why not serve a simple website then?¶
Because we want to provide a standalone offline application. Electron’s ecosystem also has the necessary tooling to help you package the application for the operating systems of your choice. That’s a big deal, if you don’t want to spend a substantial amount of time packaging the app for all major linux package managers. Unfortunately, solutions like Flatpak and Snap couldn’t fix this problem. They made the list longer.
Can’t we just serve a progressive web-app?¶
PWAs were a nice idea, that didn’t really work out in practice. The main reason was that the concept was never properly supported or promoted. If you don’t believe me, you can try to install a web-application (add to home screen) on iOS. Because of that, most people don’t even know what a PWA is. It's an evolving situation, but we are not there yet.
What about Tauri?¶
Tauri’s biggest selling point is that it dramatically reduces the size of the binary, by using the native webview of the system. The problem with that, is that we also lose one of the biggest advantages of Electron, which bundles a Chromium based webview. The amount of confidence that we get from that is invaluable in my opinion. The alternative, is to make sure that our app works as intended on all target webviews. This adds significant burden, especially if you are using modern APIs that might not be currently supported.
Rust could be a plus for certain developers, but if you don’t have any prior experience, it would add another language to your stack. Electron is also more mature and battle tested.
As a Linux user, I would take the extra disk size and memory hit, if the alternative is no application at all. If you want to read when not to use Electron, you can check the corresponding section on their documentation.