NeutralinoJS: Lightweight Electron alternative using native browser controls

Post by pcr910303 » Wed, Feb 26, 2020, 2:54 PM UTC

antoineMoPa wrote: post #3

So if I understand right, what makes this lighter than electron is the fact that only webkit2 is used instead of embedding the whole chromium app.

Post by asdkhadsj » Wed, Feb 26, 2020, 2:56 PM UTC

Post by antoineMoPa » Wed, Feb 26, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

pcr910303 wrote: post #11

antoineMoPa wrote: post #3

So if I understand right, what makes this lighter than electron is the fact that only webkit2 is used instead of embedding the whole chromium app.

Looks like it's using system controls on macOS, Windows and dynamically linking to webkit on Linux for rendering the served HTML/CSS/JS (from node). I see mentions of WKWebView(the system webkit) in the code[0], and while I don't know any Windows programming, they are #including [1] - looks like a system included web view (presumably the one that edge was based on). The linux build requires libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev to b…

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Feb 26, 2020, 3:05 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #14

rusticpenn wrote: post #9

> There are some drawbacks such as Windows edition is based on IE etc. What does this mean?

It uses whatever the system webview is. So on Windows that is IE, on Mac it’s WKWebView, not sure about Linux. It’s a trade off: it’s much more lightweight but loses cross platform consistency. For some that might be absolutely fine, for others it may not.

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 26, 2020, 3:13 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #16

This is the correct way of doing it when a PWA doesn't cut it. No need to push a full browser engine when the OS already has enough of them available.