John Gruber used a December 2018 Daring Fireball essay to make a larger complaint about desktop software: Electron was not the whole disease, in his view, but a symptom of users and developers caring less about native Mac behavior.
The piece responded to SwiftOnSecurity’s comments about Microsoft’s move from EdgeHTML toward Chromium. SwiftOnSecurity argued on Twitter that Microsoft’s decision was less about Google Chrome itself than about Electron, the framework that lets developers ship desktop apps built around web technologies. In that reading, Microsoft wanted a Chromium-compatible base that could serve Electron-style apps with fewer duplicated browser engines chewing through system resources.
SwiftOnSecurity was bleak about the direction of desktop software, saying Electron was damaging both macOS and Windows as it spread and predicting that desktop applications were headed toward JavaScript. Gruber said he did not share that level of pessimism about native apps, but called Electron a serious problem.
The Mac argument
Gruber’s main claim was that the Mac had changed as it became more popular. More users should have meant more developer attention, he wrote, but many newer Mac users did not necessarily notice or care when an app ignored macOS conventions, performed poorly, or failed to feel like a Mac app.
He contrasted that with the reaction to Microsoft Word 6.0 for Mac in the 1990s. Gruber pointed to a 2004 account by Microsoft’s Rick Schaut, who wrote that customers complained not only about Word 6.0’s size and speed, but also that it did not feel “Mac-like.” Schaut said that episode helped push Microsoft toward separate Mac and Windows product organizations.
Gruber disagreed with one part of Schaut’s framing. He argued that users were not merely attached to Word 5.0 out of habit. In his view, Word 5.0 respected Mac design conventions, while Word 6.0 looked and behaved like a Windows product transplanted onto the Mac.
That comparison led to the sharper point: Gruber said Google Docs running in Chrome was less Mac-like than the software Mac users rejected in the mid-1990s. The difference, he argued, was that modern Mac users had become willing to accept software that did not behave like native Mac software.
Apple was not spared
Gruber also blamed Apple for weakening its own standards. He criticized the early “Marzipan” apps in macOS 10.14 Mojave, including News, Home, Stocks, and Voice Memos, calling them poor in both function and feel.
He singled out the redesigned Mac App Store in Mojave for a basic keyboard failure: according to Gruber, Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End did not work for scrolling or jumping through views. Pressing Page Down inside an article produced a beep instead of movement, he wrote, leaving mouse or trackpad input as the only option.
Gruber noted that the App Store was not an Electron app. That was the point of the criticism. If Apple could ship a flagship Mac app that missed standard scrolling behavior normally supplied by the platform’s frameworks, he argued, Electron was not the only threat to native desktop quality.
His conclusion was aimed less at any single framework than at apathy. Gruber wrote that the danger to the Mac was not mainly iPads, Chromebooks, or Windows convertibles, but a fading insistence on the details that make good Mac apps work properly.
This story draws on original reporting from Daring Fireball.
