alt Hacker NewsThis is a lazy statement based on extremely vague handwaving about desktop v.s. web. It's not the 2010s anymore. Time to drop these generalities.
Users were migrating to us _from_ desktop applications. Collaboration was the key differentiator, but a less well known reason was that improved performance, including but not limited to the support of large design systems, was also a commonly cited reason among paying customers for migrating to Figma.
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How dare you make a performant, accessible app that's easy to distribute, instead of spinning up a different eng. team to maintain a different codebase on a different deployment pipeline so 1% of your userbase can say it's a "real" desktop app instead of a silly "fake" desktop app. :P
Jokes aside, Figma's stack is super inspiring, and y'all's articles on sync engines heavily inspired my work on LegendKeeper. I appreciate the work you do!
I’m just one data point, but when I tried Figma (admittedly many many years ago), I didn’t find it particularly performant. I remember being intrigued by the concept of vector networks (was that the name?) but being in the browser made it such an awful experience to use and so unreliable to shortcuts that I promptly abandoned it and never looked back.
I never communicated this to the team, but I doubt I was alone. All that is not to knock you down, I just wanted to share that being a proper native desktop app does matter to some people for practical reasons other than performance, even if you’re not aware of it.
Users still care.
Desktop or collaborative is a false dichotomy. Desktop or performance is too.
I get why you did what you did. It makes sense. But don’t think there aren’t people out here who HATE everything being shoved on the web with no desktop option.
No, electron and PWA don’t count.