Every operating system contributed to the bloat. Windows has Win32, OS X has Carbon / Cocoa, Linux has X11 and various widget libs that sit on top of it. So it has been a perennial nut to crack to make cross platform widgets - wxWidgets, QT, SWT/JWT/Swing on Java, XMLShell (Firefox), Electron, GTK/GTK#, winelib etc.
Throw mobile platforms into the mix and it’s an unholy mess. Lowest common denominator is HTML and so the likes of Electron “wins” even though it’s bloated and slow.
I wonder why so many people bundle Electron when you can make your app run in any browser. Like, you can totally write a program that just launches the browser and makes it load a site from lokal storage
Electron (and Tauri, and Neutralino) also offers some deeper OS integration stuff that browsers don’t do or actively block; direct file management, USB peripheral control, that sort of thing.
But for something like Discord, you’re totally right. You just need the browser.
Sure, except that end user market share for MacOS is larger than Linux probably
Depends, apple & linux are toe to toe in the research world.
is that where you find a lot of electron programs?
There are indeed lots of Mac users at CERN. But CERN is mostly concerned with particles other than electrons.