Re: Showstopper desktop runtime issue

3) Electron

Pros:

- Full Javascript runtime, no more C++ code to handle

- Self packaging for all the environments

Cons:

- No fully supported on Linux based OS with old libstdc++, (This might solve the problem: https://github.com/mattermost/desktop/issues/312)

Losing support for things like RHEL6 would make it completely unworkable for several of my largest customers. Particularly in large enterprise organisations, this would be a very substantial issue.

That's good to know. There are clunky workarounds (shipping different libcs for example, but that potentially adds licensing issues).

Sidenote: It would only be an issue for desktop mode. Web mode should not be affected.

- CPU/RAM high utilization (Found a issues around and the majority of them have solutions like CSS animations running or settings on the created windows)

This does sound bad. But do we actually know if this is worse in Electron than it is in the option #2? I mean sure, we point to things like Slack, but that may not be because of electron, it may be because the app running inside it?

We don't know for sure, but we do know that Chrome in general is a bit of a hog. It's certainly not a stretch to think a combination of those things are why people (correctly) see browser based apps as being more resource hungry.

- Electron does not support tabs by default, only HTML tabs

I think that also makes it a showstopper. This was another one of the main complaints I have personally heard from people going from pgadmin3 -> pgadmin4, and enough to make people not want to use it at all. It would be really bad to go back to that.

To clarify; it would mean no tabs, but not single window. That was already working in the PoC. In other words, helpfiles, the debugger and query tools could all be opened in new windows, just not tabs on the same window that could be docked and un-docked.

I suspect for most people that would be enough.

3) Electron can to play, first when we though about removing QTWebkit, because it always packs a browser with it and also and there is a very big Open Source Community being it. It came back again when when we saw that we were ready to ditch the browser. (As a personal note I dislike applications that I install in my machine and pop browser open to do anything, this is a personal issue that I would like to see if it was shared by others that was why we decided to park Electron for a second time. Because if our users are ok with it there is no need to add extra complexity to the product)

The most interesting thing about the cons that I found in Electron there is an issue open for them and a bunch of different solutions to try to handle it, or even advises on how to handle it. This option also allow us to focus less on browser compatibility as the main target of our development will become Chromium which is the base of browsers like UC Browser, Vivaldi, Opera, Google Chrome.

Please don't ever give up browser independence for the *web* version of pgadmin. Don't be That Project (TM). 

Not on my watch!

(And don't give up on proper tabs either, but I'm sure Electron might catch up in that eventually -- and the issue around RHEL6 will also go away eventually)

RHEL 6 is in support until 2024, though it's already halfway through the maintenance 2 phase. It's definitely going, but we really don't know how many folks might still be using it in production on systems they're updating and using pgAdmin on. That last bit is important; many folks will continue to run production servers on RHEL/CentOS 6 for years, but how many are using them for client-side stuff or actively updating things like pgAdmin on them?