If you’re a small shop or solo dev, it is real hard to justify going native on three platforms when electron gives it for (near) free. And outside of HN, no one seems to blink at a 250MB bundle.
There are alternatives like Tauri that use the system browser and allow substantially smaller bundles, but they’re not nearly as mature as Electron, and you will get cross platform UI bugs (some of which vary by user’s OS version!) from the lack of standardization.
I’d actually seen this project before because the author did a nice write up on using React portal to portal into electron windows[1], which is something I decided to do in my app.
I’d just assumed his was a cross platform project.
I’m not excusing this bug. There are several poor decisions that went into this issue, but my contention is that using electron (with the resulting 250mb bundle) is not one of them.
You should probably not roll your own auto-updater.
If you do, checking every 5 minutes for updates is waaaay too often (and likely hurts battery life by triggering the radio).
And triggering a download without a user-prompt also feels hostile to me.
The app size compounds the problem here, but the core issue is bad choices around auto-updating
Different versions of electron bundle different versions of chromium. There can/will be rendering differences between them.
Tauri is an alternative framework that uses whatever web view the OS provides, saving ~200mb bundle size. On Mac that’s a (likely outdated) version of Safari. On Windows it’ll be Edge. Not sure what Linux uses, I’d guess it varies by distro.
The promise of Electron (and it’s an amazing value prop) is that your HTML/JS UI will always look and work the same as in your dev environment, no matter what OS the host is running.
I don’t have the time or inclination to test my app on the most recent 3 releases of the most popular operating systems every time I change something in the view layer. With Electron, I trade bundle size for not having to do so.
I do think alternatives like Tauri are compelling for simple apps with limited UI, or where a few UI glitches are acceptable (e.g. an internal app). Or for teams that can support the QA burden.
I go into more detail in a sibling comment, but Tauri does not provide a standardized web runtime. The webview you get depends on your OS and OS version. They’re all “WebKit”, but definitely do not all render the same. I have built a Tauri app and switched to Electron after encountering multiple x-plat rendering bugs.
And even when nothing changed?!? Fucking lazy developers aka "I have an idle ≥1Gb/s pipe to the download server". What happened to rsync/zsync/zstd (with dictionary)? There are so many good tools freely available to reduce wasted bandwidth when you insist on reinventing the wheel. sigh
Per [1] That would be 39MB (uncompressed; probably about half that compressed) to include ffmpeg-darwin-arm64, since OS X doesn't ship with ffmpeg installed.
FWIW the transitive dependencies of the nixOS ffmpeg add up to 764MB, but dynamically linking is always much larger than statically linking, and that calculation will include more than just the shared-libraries.
Also note that he app includes an ffmpeg that is 39MB uncompressed.
