> I just ... don't care about your app enough to justify running more chrome instances

Is the author going to uninstall Slack, Atom, Chrome, and Spotify, then?

Electron has won out because key apps have opted to use it and decided that the trade-offs of user CPU and battery are worth some amount less than their productivity as developers. Yes, there are alternatives to developing native desktop apps in JavaScript (I'm not sure I've seen React Native used this way, but it probably exists somewhere out there.) People opt for Electron because it's holistic, battle-tested and easy to use.

I'm not excusing Electron's (many) flaws. There should be a concerted effort by the team to "disable" parts of Chrome that don't make sense for native apps, or at the very least let it be configurable. He's right, there's no reason Slack should have access to the GamePad API (or WebVR, etc.)

My overall point is that like everything, productivity of the end-user is always going to have some kind of trade-off with the productivity of the developer (or more specifically, the business considerations of the company.) Always. We don't write assembly anymore even though the apps would be a gajillion times faster than writing Electron-wrapped web apps.

Now, complaining that Electron/Slack/etc. are CPU/battery-hungry is completely valid and a good discussion to have, but you only get me to jump into the HN comments once you start delivering global developer edicts with no regard for the other considerations those projects have made.

> The other sad fact is that even most developers have no idea that this is even happening on their computers. They run slack but have no idea how hungry it is. As a developer its your responsibility to know this stuff.

I'm not sure I completely agree here, "responsibility" is a bit heavy of a word.

> Users: Please complain more about slow programs. Its 2016. We carry supercomputers in our pockets. Its simply not ok for apps to be sluggish.

Wait, this is the first instance (edit- second, but mentioned in passing in the previous paragraph) the author mentions "sluggishness" as a metric. IMO sticking with measurable stats like CPU and battery life are better because you have no idea if someone other than yourself experiences or even perceives this sluggishness. What about non-developers at BigCo that only run Chrome, Slack, Spotify, and Word? Would they feel sluggishness? I would guess not, since I rarely experience it as a developer on a Macbook using Chrome, Slack and Atom. (Things only get dicey when I start doing Vagrant stuff.)

> Also all you web devs: Go learn C or Rust or something. Your program runs on a computer. Until you know how that computer works, you're doomed.

Doomed to have a successful career? I prefer being "doomed" then. (For the record, I do know

> And until then get off my lawn shakes fist.

Aaaaand there we go. Maybe next time don't bury the lede? :P

> Oh, and read this talk on the website obesity crisis. Its very funny. And very sad. And very true.

This is an entirely separate concern (and one I agree with.) Heavy web pages are heavy because they are multi-megabytes to download, not because their "installed" wrapper (Chrome) is hundreds of megabytes.