Why is Electron so popular, but PWAs have seemingly failed to take off? Everyone was beating the PWA drum for a while, but I've almost never seen it implemented.
What's the reason, lack of discoverability? I'd rather run one Chrome instance than a dozen apps that use varying versions of Electron.
My guess is that teaching users a different way to install a desktop app limits adoption.
The dependency on Chrome is a turnoff for people who don't already use Chrome. An Electron app just depends on the operating system (apparently), so the install is much like other desktop apps.
What matters to developers is not the same as what matters to users.
Users: Does it run and do the things I want and It's obvious how to access it?
PWA's are a sandboxed environment, where devs do not have control of browser version, cannot modify chromium, and cannot bundle necessary binary code. Even Spotify bundles in faster JSON parsers, and probably a number of other things.
I've given up on Electron-based apps and just use the corresponding webapp in a tab in Firefox (and if they don't offer one, I usually just do without the app). I got here because I got tired of running several extra browsers that ate up my RAM and killed performance.
An average user might not be able to connect the dots this way and realize what's going on with their machine. They'll just complain "my laptop is slow all the time and I don't know why". As developers, I feel like we have a responsibility to take better care of our users in this manner. Using a solution that will consume a GB or more of unshareable memory for something that doesn't need it (which is mostly everything) is a poor choice that puts the developer's needs (write-once-run-anywhere; faster, cheaper development time; fewer developers needed) over the user's.
So I fundamentally disagree that users only care that the app does the things they want, and nothing more.
Is this part of what Microsoft is doing with Chrome being pre-installed (via Edge)? I can't find a source, but I heard that using the existing chrome on the machine would reduce disk size for applications and possibly even allow them to share memory.
A lot of PWA features aren't implemented everywhere, and that depends entirely on browser vendors' decisions. i.e. a lot of API's are not supported in Mobile Safari, and in general, it takes a pretty significant amount of time for a Web feature to appear in all major browsers.
Because with Electron the "app builder" decides which extensions are ran. With a PWA, the user. Like 33% of all users use ad blockers, so its all about $$$. That (no incentive), and Electron was first...
What's the reason, lack of discoverability? I'd rather run one Chrome instance than a dozen apps that use varying versions of Electron.