Talk about bloated apps: Proton Drive - 236 MB, Proton Mail - 97.6 MB, Proton VPN - 260 MB. And each one installs a separate instance of Chromium browser. Missed opportunity to use some alternatives, like Tauri and actually improve user experience by providing smaller and faster downloads.
At least nice to see that they are hiring people with Python/GTK/Qt knowledge to build Linux applications. Fingers crossed for more quality in Proton apps for Linux.
Hi! I worked on the desktop app and I can share some insights regarding why we went for Electron instead of Tauri.
We started the project with a market overview of what our competitors and other companies were using, and the overwhelming majority is using either Electron or CEF. Here are a few reasons why we decided to go for Electron:
- Electron is mature, it has been present for more than 10 years now and has supported many companies to build spectacular software (VSCode, Slack, One Password, Discord).
- Electron Forge helps remove many of the pains of building custom Electron Builder configuration and significantly improved development speed.
- All the Node.js and JS ecosystem of libraries is available to support development. This can range to security vulnerability scanning (electronegativity) to an .app creation for an uninstaller (mac-appify).
- Electron is based on Node.js and Chromium. Chromium is one of the criticisms made against Electron, but it's also one of his strength. Using Chromium ensure a mostly consistent experience across all OSes.
Those are the main reasons we decided to go for Electron instead of alternatives such as Tauri. Tauri looks promising, but the lack of usage by big companies and the use of the OS web view (which could introduce unexpected bugs) was what made us go for Electron instead.
edit: the Proton Mail desktop application is the first application using Electron. Other apps are built using native technologies
Thank you for detailed explanation. With initiatives like "Interop" and browser engines getting more compatible, it would be neat to see some experiments using "web views" in a few years.
At least nice to see that they are hiring people with Python/GTK/Qt knowledge to build Linux applications. Fingers crossed for more quality in Proton apps for Linux.