Linux

It's basically Chrome. It's not a real application, it's a website pretending to be one. It uses a metric fuckton of RAM and eats your battery faster than Prince Andrew a minor.

Each electron App is actually a full independent chromium browser install running a website. It's easy to code for and works cross platform as a result, but it's essentially just a website, although they can run offline depending on what's been built in to the local app.

Each electron app running on your system is a separate full chromium app running, with no sharing of resources between each instance. So they take up a lot of space each and duplicate all the resource usage, and potentially the security flaws.

It's just the webapp. If we want the webapp we use a browser.

It's what you deploy to your users if you want to work around ad blockers and browser extensions. It's a great tool to get operating system level access to exfiltrate information about your users and identify them uniquely, even if they would prefer that not to happen.

All that with the help of Google's telemetry engine aka Chrome, which further helps Alphabet to manifest their interpretation of web standards in the world.

We worked to move things onto the web. Now people bring the web back to your desktop with every application bringing it's own browser shell. We have come full circle and we're now using 10x the resources.

Electron is the prime example of everything that is wrong in IT.

There are other options like Tauri that do the same thing as electron, but instead of bundling chromium with the app, it relies on the OS provided web view. It’s also built with Rust, which tends to be faster.

As an example, Mac would use Safari, Windows would use Edge (chromium), and Linux would likely use WebKitGTK, which is what safari uses.

By using the default browser, developers save a ton of space—at the risk of compatibility issues, which are very very rare nowadays.

Are you kidding me? Doesn't bother me that much, as I use Thunderbird with Protonmail bridge. I'm still waiting on Proton Drive for linux. Well, I'm gonna end up self hosting at this point. :(

Does it support offline access?

Is the bridge actually being discontinued?

No, but what from their moves it is very clear it won't live long.

they don’t support SMTP, but realistically they actually can’t unless they have the ability to read your emai

Technically they do use SMTP... and it's possible for a provider and provide submission and generic SMTP do clients without having to read the email content.

There are lots of ways to do e2e encryption on e-mail (no server access to the contents) over SMTP (OpenPGP, S/MIME etc.). There are also header minimization options to prevent metadata leakage. And Proton decided NOT to use any of those proven solutions (in a standard and open way at least) and go for some obscure implementation instead because it fits their business better and makes development faster.

They cannot decrypt your data while sitting, so IMAP cannot work.

You have to be a paying customer to use that app IIRC.

they don't support IMAP

They don't support IMAP because they want emails to remain end-to-end encrypted, and IMAP doesn't have any way of doing that. The gateway decrypts the emails locally, then serves them as plain text.

We need something better than IMAP, that's designed for modern use cases. Something that's not stateful... Maybe a web service or something like that. JMAP seems promising but barely any providers have implemented it.