It's an awkward transition period toward a universal virtual machine, universal bytecode format JIT based runtime that runs in browser and out of it. Ultimate cross platformness. The Holy Grail. Lot's of people trying several things that tackle some of it but not all. All of them will perish as all things do but they'll pave the way for the future. Let the revolution begin;
NeutralinoJS: Lightweight Electron alternative using native browser controls
181–190 of 200 posts
Re: NeutralinoJS: Lightweight Electron alternative using native browser controls
#182If you want anything from the web to work on Windows as native why not just use PWA utilizing Microsoft's (1) own PWA Builder (2) including the availability of proper debugging tools and acceptance in the store? It doesn't matter what tech it uses. The more important thing is it will be supported and updated. There won't be any surprises. (1) https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/pwa/ (2) https://www.pwabuild…
But it works on only Chrome at the moment. Firefox or Safari users wouldn't install Chrome just for your PWA.
What are you talking about? Read my comment. You have stand-alone native-like app that Microsofts creates for you from your web service. The app could also be installed directly from the Windows Store. No browser required at all.
Re: NeutralinoJS: Lightweight Electron alternative using native browser controls
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's Carlo [1], which is an alternative to Electron that uses locally installed Chrome. 1: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo
The problem with this is that is requires people to have Chrome installed. That's a awkward dependency to require for a stand alone app.
And node!
Re: NeutralinoJS: Lightweight Electron alternative using native browser controls
#184Earlier 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.
Behind my two Safari windows is the text editor I use for my technical writing job: BBEdit, a native desktop app. (For coding, though, I prefer to use MacVim, a native desktop app, although I've lately been trying out a beta of the forthcoming Panic Nova, a native desktop app.) I also use Marked, a native desktop app, for Markdown previewing occasionally. Of course, I spend a lot of time in the Terminal, a native des…
Offtopic, but if you’d like an elegant hybrid† Markdown viewing/editing experience, I’d suggest https://typora.io/, another nicely-polished low-memory-consumption native app.
† I don’t know what to call this editing paradigm. It’s somewhere between source-editing and WYSIWYG. Document markup nodes are rendered as their source syntax when your cursor is “inside” them, allowing for plaintext modification of the syntax; but then, when your cursor leaves a node, it switches to rendering as its formatted output instead. You can cursor back into the node to edit it more at any time. It’s pretty unique. It’s the editing style that Slack’s new input box wishes it had.
Re: NeutralinoJS: Lightweight Electron alternative using native browser controls
#185Earlier 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.
I wish this urban legend would just stop: the Spotify desktop client is NOT an Electron app, it's a CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) app.
Same thing, just another name.
Re: NeutralinoJS: Lightweight Electron alternative using native browser controls
#186I 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.
> Native desktop apps are never coming back.
They never went away to start with, it is just a couple of Electron outliers out there.
Re: NeutralinoJS: Lightweight Electron alternative using native browser controls
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Current version of Windows already have Chromium in the form of new Edge and Microsoft seems to start pushing progressive web applications. At least they made good integration with system for them. So, perhaps, soon we will have PWAs instead of bunch of electron apps each carrying its own Chromium.
PWAs can never fully substitute native applications. It's difficult to access hardware and impossible to call operating system functions from a PWA. Applications that do something interesting tend to have a native library behind the frontend that does performance-sensitive work.
Quite the contrary, one of the benefits of PWAs is exactly that when they are distributed via app stores they get access to native APIs without any kind of manual FFI.
That is how they work across ChromeOS, Android and Windows, with Apple being the outlier for obvious reasons.
Re: NeutralinoJS: Lightweight Electron alternative using native browser controls
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Gnome already is based on html/js. There is no need for 10 different UI toolkits if one standard can be optimized. The problem is html/js are far from well designed but due to their popularity a lot of time and money has been spent optimizing them.
GNOME makes use of JavaScript, not HTML.
Re: NeutralinoJS: Lightweight Electron alternative using native browser controls
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
We had that in Windows 98, it was Active Desktop. It was bloatish and a lot of people disabled it in order to get far more cycles. Heck, IE and Explorer.exe were the same. http://toastytech.com/files/throboff.html KDE3 did the same with KParts, but it was several times better.
Microsoft was ahead of its time in this. In 2020 we are ready for it. Moore's law has caught up. It would be less efficient and more wasteful to continue things as normal where every program has its own Electron. People already use Electron type apps. New ones are being made every day. That's not going away. If Microsoft and Apple put this in the OS, it would decrease the user's resource utilization. It's a net win f…
Smooth?! I gave up on it and installed XFCE to get CPU cycles back.
Re: NeutralinoJS: Lightweight Electron alternative using native browser controls
#190I see projects like this pop up every once in a while and get abandoned. A simpler approach may be to just publish a basic web server as your app (express on top of node would do) that runs on the local machine on some random port and have users just go to that URL with their regular installed browser. Bonus points for no leakage of security / CORS / etc. issues from the UI side of things, every unsafe thing needs to…
Love the idea of shipping something smaller. In your proposed idea, would a user still need to make sure node and express were installed? Or can you have a user download a project folder and initiate the same way they would a typical executable?