Heard of Electron? There is also Electrino, Electron-like stuff that uses your system's browser instead of embedding full Chrome. A “Hello World” app takes 115 MB using Electron, but only 167 kB using Electrino.

Too bad it's still a proof of concept with almost no features.

https://github.com/pojala/electrino

Use me as “noooo desktop webapps bad they're slow they eat ram gtk/qt/whatever ftw 🤡”

Cool.

I'll wait two years and then maybe there'll be a reason to learn.

Your system's browser? So it scours your system for a chromium install? What if you have a system that either

a) only has an outdated browser based on an outdated chromium

b) doesn't have any chromium based browsers installed

@nitnip it has its shortcomings, obviously. But the payoff is a drastic reduction in app size, roughly by a factor of thousand. If app size is not a concern, Electron is better.

So why did they start to not depend on system libraries in the first place?

So its basically a PWA?

Have you heard about tauri? It's way more better concept

@Oktokolo this!

This looks promising! :)

@iiii …yes.

@kiki actually PWAs saved as applications are pretty okay. Too bad that Firefox actually removed the native support for that, while an addon tries to maintain that.

Edge, on the other hand, has a native support for saving pretty much any web site as an application.

Shell integration must suck. Good luck explaining to your typical Linux that this instance of Chrome is actually not Chrome, it has its own icon, uptime status and name, even though it runs an executable that already has all that stuff directly associated with it.

I would expect it can be done, but every application list of every DE has some chance of breaking.

using "system's browser" under windows, sadly, equals "using edge", and i'd rather have a date with AOK than doing this.

There's also Tauri which does pretty much the same thing

I'm not really convinced though that I would want my app to depend on some mysterious system webview with unknown features, safety concerns, etc.

@tosensei Since Edge is also based on chromium and microsoft forces you into keeping shit updated, it would actually be a good choice.

@nitnip well, "rotten food" is based on "food" - i still wouldn't wanna eat it. even if it's freshly rotten food.

@tosensei I gotta admit you're on fire here

@kiki you calling me hot? ;)

@tosensei aren’t you?

@kiki don't see the causal relationship between those two factoids. and it's always impossible to answer this kind of question by oneself - one tends to be somewhat biased

My problem with Electron is the memory usage, rather than the disk usage. It's fine with one application, but when I'm on my work laptop running a browser and 3+ Electron apps, it kind of uses an obscene amount of memory.

@EmberQuill unfortunately this is indeed the case and the consequence of using a full-blown browser every time you need to do some basic things. However, code discipline and optimization is also a huge factor. I've seen really quick Electron apps, and then I've seen Slack.

@kiki True. One of the Electron apps I use most frequently is VSCode and I swear they did some kind of black magic to make it as lightweight and snappy as it is despite running on Electron.

And then there's Slack. I've thought about switching from the desktop app to the website in my browser to see if that runs a little lighter (since the browser would be open anyway for my work).

@EmberQuill lightweight? Well, maybe without the C++ extension it is lightweight...

@iiii yeah, can't speak for extensions and to be fair it's not exactly lightweight. Just lighter than many other Electron apps and it feels snappier too.

Nothing beats native when it comes to performance, though.

@EmberQuill with c++ extension it can hog a lot of memory 🫠also because of stuck processes