I feel like Tauri (https://tauri.app/) would be an excellent (though not *fully* native) alternative or third option here. It still uses a webview but runs a Rust backend that can be leveraged for just about everything unrelated to rendering the UI.

It still works well with many JS/TS frameworks, like the React framework currently used by the Electron wrapper, so would conceivably offer a smooth transition pathway: migrate from Electron to Tauri in one shot, leaving as much of the original TypeScript in tact as needed/desired, then gradually port the current backend to Rust, focusing on the most performance-critical features first.

Also, the Tauri team is FANATICAL about security. Their whole raison d'être for starting the project was to create a more secure alternative to Electron, which will always be beholden to Chromium and therefore subject to the inherent security vulnerabilities of Chromium's broken patch/release cycles. WebView is much less of a vulnerability and based on more reliable standards that won't go away merely at a whim as Google dictates.

Rust just seems like a good bet for both near term and long term, imo, since it can run on all native platforms, both desktop and mobile, with some good up-and-coming UI libraries like iced-rs should reliance on Tauri and/or webviews ever become undesirable, not to mention WASM, etc, etc.

the proton bridge is a thing and allows you to bring your own favorite thick client app such as mozilla thunderbird, just saying...

Yes. also wrapper sucks

Yeah, I'm experiencing GUI lag in the proton windows app, seems like it's offloading elements and everytime I maximize it's slowly loading in the GUI.

It might be a side effect or compat with my particular system, I'm planing to reinstall Win10/11 later with fresh drivers and GPU and we'll see then.

Currently, there’s really no reason to use the Mail app over the website. If anything, there are downsides to using it, such as the white flashes that appear when cold launching the app. I don’t use dark mode for no reason, and I don’t like being blinded by multiple white flashes due to a sloppy Electron bug that will most likely never be fixed. A native app would already address this problem, be much faster, and integrate better with Windows. Please consider developing a native desktop app.

It's a matter of app reaction speed. I fully support this proposal.

You have a lot of desktop clients to choose from! or just your preferred web browser ...
Why create so many interfaces? they should focus or more important features / improvements

I don't think that these are "minor" benefits. Performance - yes (even so, much much better, if everything is stored locally it would open just right away, I personally have to wait somewhat betwein 10-30 second to open proton mail!). But also:
- much faster searches as it is storem locally
- offline access

I don't really think this is a priority as it can take a ton of time to develop separate GUI apps with only minor benefits, aka performance.

Also for macOS please.. the electron app sucks big time. Luckily we have the Bridge that still operates..

I use a PWA of the web app using the "Progressive Web Apps for Firefox" plugin and it offers a superior user experience than what Proton Mail is offering. They should really be identical, but somehow this hacky solution produces better results.

Agree. Right now, I use Protonmail for my "important" emails. Gmail is for attracting "junk" and there's an aol email that my ISP provided that I never use. I don't want to "pollute" my proton account by importing those emails into it. What I really need is a desktop app that independently connects to those three accounts.

To that end, you might consider taking a look at Mailspring. It's good email application that's cross platform and I have confirmed it works with Protonmail right now You can write a plugin for it that would not only simplify connection to your server but, perhaps, even add your calendar.

A "Proton-Enhanced" version of Mailspring could be symbiotic for both of your companies. It would give you a better desktop app and infuse life into an already good stand-alone email client.

I agree. I love the idea of the desktop app, but it would need to have it's own regular and advanced settings that operate independently of the web settings so that users can have settings when using a browser that are appropriate for that method, but have other settings when using the desktop app since that is a different method.