With the release of the desktop apps, Proton Mail is now available on all major desktop and mobile platforms, offering over 100 million people worldwide a private alternative to Big Tech, regardless of their device.
Our team is currently working on resolving the connection issues experienced by our Linux users, so the app will be temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Electron is basically the "lazy" way of doing things, and not terribly different from progressive web apps. It's basically a browser that looks like an app. And it's more resource and battery intensive.
As others said, it's basically chrome bundled with the website code so it looks like an app. And while Electron does offer devs the ability to do things a webapp can't, it still brings the chrome browser engine along with all the inefficient ram usage and potential for security flaws that implies.
Plenty of companies started using electron for writing cross platform apps, these apps(electron) use JavaScript engine, which makes it easy to develop these apps but as a tradeoff it uses more system resources than your regular native apps. And when they all do it(discord, vscode, steam etc.) you ask, why the hell do I need these dedicated apps if all they do is just start up a browser? I can just open another tab in firefox or whatever and be done with it.
Shame. I do my best to avoid the resource bloat of electron apps whenever possible.
I mean, when my own iron - dual 12-core 24-thread Xeon E5, 128Gb RAM - sees non-trivial impacts from just two or three Electron apps, I do my best to nip that in the bud by avoiding all that crap.
What’s so hard about building a traditional app? With DotNet you could build a single program for all three platforms, and you could bundle DotNet up into that app such that it doesn’t even need a separately-installed sandbox like Java does.
As a .net dev I agree this would be ideal, but I don't do UI much these days so I don't know what's out there for frameworks right now.
I do know one thing that's out there in spades tho, and that's "full stack" JS devs. :P That's probably what's "so hard" about building a traditional app.
There aren't any great cross platform UI frameworks for .net. There are a few out there, but they are not as robust as what you can do with stuffing a react app into electron.
I like Proton, but I've never wanted a desktop app. Thunderbird is great. It's super annoying to need the external connection client. I'd rather they just spent the energy on native Thunderbird support without a second GUI.
I would prefer they add caldev and carddev to the bridge app so thunderbird can have access to calendar and contacts. I feel that would be better setup for power users, but the integrated desktop app helps normies adopt.
Firstly, it uses lots of CPU on a pretty powerful machine (7945hx). It at least takes 1-3% idling and up to 40-60% while doing basic tasks.
Secondly, I haven't found jack shit related to background processing for notifications and updates. Wouldn't this be the primary reason to have an app - to get status updates immediately?
Thirdly, it's just a web version with exactly the same UI, exactly the same settings and so on. It literally works better in Firefox than the app itself.
I don't see any reason to use the app over web version in a browser. No, really.
Any chance of being able to double click to open a message in a new window? The messages are getting cutoff in the client on MACOS unless I maximize the window.
I use Firefox, but I have to use a different browser for PWAs, it sucks. If I'm lucky, Epiphany works with that website, otherwise I have to use some Chromium browser. Bleh.
According to Andy the timeframe depends on the level of the integration they want to achieve. Andy said he could see an Ubuntu version arriving in the next probabably 24 months, longer to be at the point where the major linux distributions are supported and lets say 90% of Linux is supported.