Re: Matrix IRC bridge considered harmful

[Tobias Mueller <muelli cryptobitch de>]

Hi,

On Wed, 2020-02-12 at 15:32 -0800, Britt Yazel wrote:
> Can you explain to me what the big issue with web clients are? I keep
> hearing over and over again that developers don't want to use web
> clients, either in browser or with Electron, but I don't recall ever
> hearing a "why" in there.
One of my reasons for disliking anything Browser-based is economic. It
takes noticeably longer to scratch all the bits of a Web browser off my
disk than anything else that has been tailored for the purpose.

A corollary is the gigantic trusted computing base. Not only do the Web
projects that I have to deal with pull in ridiculous amounts of
dependencies (most of which of questionable quality or reputation), they
ultimately also require a fully fledged Web browsing engine with all
bells and whistles. The number of lines of code used for some mundane
functionality as IRC is staggering.

And as big code bases tend to produce big binaries, we also need to have
a lot of memory to run those apps. I'm happy to be able to run my
Firefox and Evolution in parallel. I'm dreading to open any other
Browser-based thing because I know that my machine will start swapping
(yes, I do have swap space, because I sometimes I need to have Firefox,
Evolution, and something else running..).

So I'd rather have a bad Gtk (or "native") client than a good Web
client. Also because fixing Gtk-based apps is well within our skill set.

Cheers,
  Tobi