NeutralinoJS: Lightweight Electron alternative using native browser controls

Post by ajxs » Wed, Feb 26, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

zelly wrote: post #101

derefr wrote: post #48

I feel like nobody cares too much if they’re running one Electron app; people do have the headroom for an extra 1-2GB of RAM usage. The problem comes when they run several Electron apps at once, and each comes with its own “base” overhead (i.e. the runtime memory consumption of the browser-runtime as a whole, independent of how many render contexts are open.) Chromium is built to share a lot of things between tabs ef…

Given that everyone brings this up every time Electron is mentioned, and Electron apps keep proliferating, I expect a future version of Windows and macOS to have Chromium bundled with the OS. There will be some platform independent open standard that Electron will use under the covers. Native desktop apps are never coming back. It will either be Electron or mobile apps emulated on desktops.

Post by ajxs » Wed, Feb 26, 2020, 9:49 PM UTC

t0astbread wrote: post #65

clownpenis_fart wrote: post #38

using the word "lightweight" to describe anything involving js and an html renderer should be prohibited

I wonder why. Given the popularity of HTML you'd think some large organization would've developed a reasonably fast _and_ memory efficient browser engine by now but everyone seems to be aggressively optimizing for speed.

Post by dsissitka » Wed, Feb 26, 2020, 9:55 PM UTC

hnuser123456 wrote: post #81

csnover wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m currently running three Electron apps: Spotify, Skype, and VS Code. Spotify: 1083.7 MB. VS Code: 890.9 MB. Skype: 406 MB. In the past, I’ve had projects open in VS Code which have caused that number to shoot up into the multi-gigabyte range. Of course this is all anecdotal but I am pretty sure these numbers come from actual experiences that people are having with Electron apps.

Keybase also uses in the range of 600MB-1GB, and 8 processes, most of which don't exit when you exit the application. I'm not sure what Discord uses because I only run it in the browser, but I'm sure it's in the same range as all of the above. I've come up with a powershell snippet to fully quit keybase and reclaim ~1GB RAM: get-process | Where-Object {$_.path -match "keybase"} | Stop-Process

Post by jcelerier » Wed, Feb 26, 2020, 10:09 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #48

I feel like nobody cares too much if they’re running one Electron app; people do have the headroom for an extra 1-2GB of RAM usage. The problem comes when they run several Electron apps at once, and each comes with its own “base” overhead (i.e. the runtime memory consumption of the browser-runtime as a whole, independent of how many render contexts are open.) Chromium is built to share a lot of things between tabs ef…

Post by dirkg » Wed, Feb 26, 2020, 10:10 PM UTC

ajxs wrote: post #121

zelly wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that everyone brings this up every time Electron is mentioned, and Electron apps keep proliferating, I expect a future version of Windows and macOS to have Chromium bundled with the OS. There will be some platform independent open standard that Electron will use under the covers. Native desktop apps are never coming back. It will either be Electron or mobile apps emulated on desktops.

Everything you've written here presents a nightmarish vision of the computing future. Ethical and privacy considerations play a large role in my decision making process on which software I use. I don't want to use Chromium at all, if possible. I use one Electron app, Slack, on account of requiring it for work. > Native desktop apps are never coming back I really hope you're wrong. This would be a terrible outcome for…