Stop using Electron for your Desktop Applications

Where did we go wrong? How is it that today’s default desktop GUI uses an HTML/CSS/JavaScript platform that was not originally designed to work natively on the desktop? It’s designed specifically for the browser and the web. Why make web pages in a browser-based shell out of native software?

Jeff Atwood (author of Stack Overflow) predicted this phenomenon back in 2007. He then formulated what he called Atwood’s Law:

Any application that can be written in JavaScript will eventually be written in JavaScript.

And so it came out that way.

And seriously, this is a clear trend in software development that’s been going on for two decades. Nowadays, most GUI applications are developed on the HTML/CSS/JavaScript platform.

To develop cross-browser applications on the web stack, the Electron platform is most often used, which has become a kind of standard.

These days, almost everything is done on Electron:

• 1Password
• Asana
• Discord
• Figma