The stark landscape and accented voiceover seem to be inspired by the documentary Happy People: A Year in the Taiga by Werner Herzog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psnY17CImaQ
Interesting, I find the 'mood' very cozy and welcoming. There's nothing nicer than a warm, dimly lit room with a computer (or in this case VCR) when it's cold and rainy outside :)
I don’t know about a III but Flash was good in the early/mid 2000’s while I was attending university.
Certainly was 10x better than what HTML was providing at the time, HTML really only jumped forward in this department when Steve banned it on iOS.
I don’t miss it, however my friend at uni made some wicked animations in the adobe Flash editor, whatever it was called. He should’ve went onto animation etc but stuck to programming.
I disagree, Flash was a real battery sucker on Android. Native CSS animations were usually smooth in Chrome; Firefox still hasn't caught up entirely on that front I feel.
Feeding animation frames through JS rather than letting the browser do its job does take a toll, but Flash freezing the entire tab while the browser plugin initialized is something I've resented the moment HTML5 came along.
In the age of the Pentium III, Flash was state of the art, but it's been a couple of decades since then.
It is a marvelous thing. A beautiful app platform. Suddenly, one day, I was no longer Linux user without app. Linux app was standard. Everybody has Linux app. I had dual-boot Linux computer to play Valorant on Windows and to live normal life on Linux. And I use Mac at work. And it is all glorious because I no longer think about which is which. And there are people who are saying it is not amazing, but it is. I can hit Ctrl-R and the application refreshes. What an astounding tool.
For me the great app platforms:
* the terminal
* the iPhone/Android
* the web
And suddenly, the web is brought to the desktop and it is cross-platform. Everything is here on my Linux. It is the Year of the Linux Desktop and everyone is complaining about web platform. But it is web platform that has brought it here. Praise be the forces that made this happen. This man has a great website, and if he has made Electron then he is always welcome to me.
I can’t find anything better than Electron/Tauri for building cross-platform desktop apps.
The browser engine is quite efficient and performant for building complex interfaces
The core of Electron can be made quite efficient and performant. It's just that commercial app developers have few incentives to dedicate significant time and effort towards optimization when modern PCs are this powerful:
You're missing the "for building complex interfaces" part. I would extend that to "for building complex interfaces with even basic accessibility features" though.
And for what it's worth, Tauri and to a lesser extent Electron is actually quite efficient. It looks bloated as hell because it allocates all kinds of RAM pages it doesn't really use in case it needs to JIT extensively (which usually get compressed or swapped out anyway), but by default it's a decent UI framework.
Tauri takes what, maybe 50MiB of RAM? It's not the most efficient way, but it's as efficient as a usable cross-platform framework gets these days. Electron is four times that, which is still better than the alternative on Linux (which was running the Windows application on Wine before Electron came along).
Telegram is written in native Qt and takes about 1750MiB of RAM on my machine to show me a chat screen. The framework isn't the issue here.
Native apps are not automatically more responsive or less bloated. Look at Xcode or Visual Studio vs VSCode. Performance is mainly the result of how much effort you want to put into optimization.
extremely fascinating details in here
https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...
> In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices
H5 animations performs much worse on all devices.
Flash animations like Felix's can run well on a Pentium III processor with 64MB memory.
Certainly was 10x better than what HTML was providing at the time, HTML really only jumped forward in this department when Steve banned it on iOS.
I don’t miss it, however my friend at uni made some wicked animations in the adobe Flash editor, whatever it was called. He should’ve went onto animation etc but stuck to programming.
Feeding animation frames through JS rather than letting the browser do its job does take a toll, but Flash freezing the entire tab while the browser plugin initialized is something I've resented the moment HTML5 came along.
In the age of the Pentium III, Flash was state of the art, but it's been a couple of decades since then.
And it was good.
the scary thing is that I love this slightly reactionary nostalgic design - mattering the content.
It probably does tell more about me than any technology or approach discussed here.
grrr...
For me the great app platforms:
* the terminal
* the iPhone/Android
* the web
And suddenly, the web is brought to the desktop and it is cross-platform. Everything is here on my Linux. It is the Year of the Linux Desktop and everyone is complaining about web platform. But it is web platform that has brought it here. Praise be the forces that made this happen. This man has a great website, and if he has made Electron then he is always welcome to me.
https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2025-electronAintBad
And for what it's worth, Tauri and to a lesser extent Electron is actually quite efficient. It looks bloated as hell because it allocates all kinds of RAM pages it doesn't really use in case it needs to JIT extensively (which usually get compressed or swapped out anyway), but by default it's a decent UI framework.
Tauri takes what, maybe 50MiB of RAM? It's not the most efficient way, but it's as efficient as a usable cross-platform framework gets these days. Electron is four times that, which is still better than the alternative on Linux (which was running the Windows application on Wine before Electron came along).
Telegram is written in native Qt and takes about 1750MiB of RAM on my machine to show me a chat screen. The framework isn't the issue here.
Just kidding. But you must have clicked somewhere. Audio autoplay hasn't been a thing on the web for years (thankfully).