it seems ridiculous that we have to embed an entire browser, meant for internet web browsing, just to create a cross-platform UI with moderate ease.
Why are native or semi-native UI frameworks lagging so far behind? am I wrong in thinking this? are there easier, declarative frameworks for creating semi-native UIs on desktop that don’t look like windows 1998?
It’s much easier to write an abstraction over one platform, an embedded chromium browser, than it is to write abstractions over several drastically different platforms. For most applications, the developers are satisfied with the performance and footprint anyway and see no value in maintaining a different application for the different platforms when it can all be written once with something like Electron.
Still, there are people out there trying to write cross-platform, native UI frameworks. For example, I believe that’s what Slint is trying to do, although I’ve never tried it myself.