The top comment is still 100% on the money. That there are desktop apps at all is 100% because the fantastic, easy to write for, powerful, well used, well known cross-platform web platform has made it possible & not misery-inducing to target a laundry list of pernickety not fun native platforms.
Flash was an not-integrated experience within the page, something not really debuggable or visible to the host platform. Electron on the other hand is super easy to break out a debugger on. We haven't seen good examples, but this should also permit some pretty advanced extending, modifying, altering Electron apps on the fly. Something, again, that I think of as extremely not Flash's forte: Flash always felt like a proprietary dump truck of pixel-pushing loaded itself on screen, without the beauty & elegance of the hypertext document.
It's also epic to me how much Slack's poor implementation drives hatred of Electron. I definitely want to see better web-app delivery mechanisms emerge, that free each app from having to distribute an embedded version of Chrome, but by far the most serious complaint to me is the cpu usage, and that's not Chrome's fault. It's just a shitty poorly built app. We can build apps like shit on Native too. Slack is a juggernaut of terribleness, and that this horror happens to have been done with Electron justifies far more hatred than is reasonable. VS Code for compare is not a massive resource hog, because the app developers decided to care about the product & make it work well.
In my view, a lot of people want to be very upset at the web, and Slack provides an endless supply of fuel on that particular fire.
