Don't use Electon. Your users WILL notice and complain about performance.
How will people notice if you are using Electon, but not if you are doing this? Is Electron doing something that makes it unnecessarily slow or are you saying that people are just conditioned to think Electron apps are slower?
Electron is a full instance of chromium. Running an electron app is essentially running a browser, which is a heavy application. All that heft translates to inefficiency.
My impression was that running 10 Electron apps would be like having 10 separate installations of Chromium running at the same time (with no shared memory). But running 10 WebView apps would be like having one browser with 10 tabs open, but where a lot of the the browser resources are shared.
In that case, I would expect a large difference in memory footprint, although both options would be bad in terms of having a non-native user interface and user experience.
The native webview use another instance of the engine, without running a complete web browser. If all apps did, the amount of resources required would be lower as they would share some common components.
With options like Firefox's SSB, you can use pages like 'apps' but at use the browser's resource pool instead of spinning up multiple Chromium instances.
It's my understanding that since each app is shipping with its own Electron version/runtime, that the resources of these are not and can't be shared or managed centrally. A chromeless web app running via the browser would effectively be just another tab use the current browser's resources (and extensions +1).
Agreed. Sorry, I took your previous comment as arguing against the comment it was in reply to.
I was quite keen on chrome apps, as they allowed you to share the chrome browser runtime in a similar way. If you add a native desktop shortcut, and use the chrome-hiding features then you can basically replace electron with a shared runtime. I have a dim memory that it may have been killed/hobbled now though...
To be fair, I haven't used Electron. At some point, I did try using Essential Object's EO.WebBrowser component for .NET which used similar amounts of RAM. People complained about the RAM usage, not performance.
I think the biggest problems with electron are memory usage, startup time, and possibly disk usage. All of which are because it's running a full browser instance.
How will people notice if you are using Electon, but not if you are doing this? Is Electron doing something that makes it unnecessarily slow or are you saying that people are just conditioned to think Electron apps are slower?