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Ask HN: How can Microsoft improve/evolve electron, now that they own GitHub?

by tumblen on 6/4/18, 5:20 PM with 27 comments

Electron is a product that seems to have a love/hate relationship with developers and users.

That being said, one of the most loved Electron applications, VSCode, is made by Microsoft and now Electron is essentially one of their assets.

It seems to me like this could mean good things for Electron.

Are there any ways you can think of that MS can improve that ecosystem?

  • by smaddock on 6/4/18, 6:18 PM

    There are a few Microsoft employees already working on improving Electron. Notably helping keep it up-to-date with Chromium [1] (current release at v61—6 versions behind stable).

    Security is an area that could use a lot of improvements. Along with keeping Chromium up-to-date, sandboxing still needs more work [2].

    Personally, I'd like to see greater support for Chrome Extensions instead of Electron's preload scripts. They're much more powerful in terms of controlling when scripts are run.

    [1] https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/12477

    [2] https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/6712

  • by _b8r0 on 6/4/18, 6:36 PM

    It's very clear there's several ways they could 'improve' it:

    * Replacing Chromium with Edge to improve integration with Windows 10.

    * Introducing .NET runtime integration

    * SharePoint and O365 integration which with the above would make it almost as powerful as SilverLight

    * Cortana support baked-in

    * Windows Telemetry

  • by DoofusOfDeath on 6/4/18, 6:08 PM

    Electron is open-source under an MIT license.

    If Microsoft can do things now with Electron that it couldn't before, there's arguably something wrong with the project.

  • by WorldMaker on 6/4/18, 6:27 PM

    Microsoft developers have already contributed directly to Electron.

    That said, if there is a direction to hope for, it might be pushing more of Electron's "value add" into the web platform itself (ie, open more standards for PWAs to adopt). Though arguably many of the things that developers particularly want from Electron like macOS menu integration are pretty strongly platform-specific and tough to standardize in way that might make sense to the web platform as a whole.

  • by chrisco255 on 6/4/18, 6:14 PM

    I think MS is already involved with Electron at some level. They are probably contributing to it since VSCode uses it. I think that they might be able to improve VSCode even more if they were to somehow integrate the Atom ecosystem into it and combine those editors.

  • by kumarharsh on 6/4/18, 6:18 PM

    I don't think something very dramatic can be done to fix electron - it was already OSS, and as sibling comments are saying, MS was already involved at some level.

    But if the project is given the same governance model and love which VSCode gets, I would have much higher hopes.

  • by butz on 6/4/18, 7:13 PM

    Progressive Web Apps are upcoming alternative to Electron. Microsoft already added support for PWAs in Edge, now they should work with other browsers vendors to add missing functionality, like file system access.

  • by Rjevski on 6/4/18, 7:25 PM

    Kill it with fire?

  • by flavio81 on 6/5/18, 5:44 PM

    >Are there any ways you can think of that MS can improve that ecosystem?

    Yes, by killing it.

  • by psyc on 6/5/18, 9:44 AM

    Same thing any motivated, funded, competent organization could have done at any time. Replace it with something functionally equivalent, but optimized.

  • by nottorp on 6/4/18, 6:23 PM

    They could start with making Skype not lag horrendously while TYPING. Or better yet, put out a native client again.

    Dreams...

  • by asdsa5325 on 6/4/18, 6:16 PM

    By never using Electron again.

  • by xkcd-sucks on 6/4/18, 10:48 PM

    Embrace, extend, extinguish