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Photino: A lighter Electron

tryphotino.io

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Re: Photino: A lighter Electron

#4

Post by pathartl »

ano-ther wrote: post #2

Looks promising. Does anyone have experience with it, or their backers https://codemag.com/ ?

I'm using it in my project LANCommander for a game launcher: https://github.com/LANCommander/LANCommander

I will probably be switching to Electron unless the project gets any sort of meaningful update. The releases on their GitHub are still v2, while the packages available on NuGet are v3. There hasn't been any code changes in the past couple of months. For the Blazor integration, it's actually broken completely for Linux (and maybe macOS).

Overall it does save on build sizes and RAM a bit, but I'm not sure about the long term viability.

Re: Photino: A lighter Electron

#6

Post by croes »

Is it really cross platform if it uses the OS render engine?

Aren't there still differences between Chromium and Webkit.

And what if a breaking change in the WebView2 is deployed per update?

Isn't that the advantage of Electron that you have total control over used render engine version?

Re: Photino: A lighter Electron

#7

Post by Blahah »

pathartl wrote: post #4
ano-ther wrote: post #2

Looks promising. Does anyone have experience with it, or their backers https://codemag.com/ ?

I'm using it in my project LANCommander for a game launcher: https://github.com/LANCommander/LANCommander I will probably be switching to Electron unless the project gets any sort of meaningful update. The releases on their GitHub are still v2, while the packages available on NuGet are v3. There hasn't been any code changes in the past couple of months. For the Blazor integration, it's actually broken completely for…

Tauri might be a nice alternative to electron. I've had good experiences with it, developing and distributing small internal tools that work cross-platform.

Re: Photino: A lighter Electron

#8

Post by anaisbetts »

I cannot describe how Bad an idea it is to try to rely on the OS-provided web browser. We chose Electron at Slack, partly because of the numerous unfixable bugs with Slack for Mac for people on downlevel operating systems, and that was just on macOS! Telling people, "You need to install a new OS" or even in the case of macOS on old devices, "You need to buy a new computer", in response to a user writing in with a bug in your app is a real uncomfortable conversation to have in Support

Tauri even themselves are building their own embedded browser (based on Servo) because they too realize that using "whatever the OS happens to have" is fundamentally not Workable as a platform. This idea Just Does Not Work for production apps with Real amounts of users

Re: Photino: A lighter Electron

#9

Post by VyseofArcadia »

I just want to say, I really miss for-real native desktop apps. As an old-school desktop app developer, everything about web dev feels awkward and unnatural to me, and I'm not too keen on the performance of the end result.

I appreciate that Photino at least is lighter in terms of install footprint and RAM use, but it is still as CPU hungry.

Re: Photino: A lighter Electron

#10

Post by M4v3R »

Blahah wrote: post #3

I'd really like to see it compared to Tauri [0] which is the established leader in this space. 0: https://tauri.app

Same, I'm using Tauri for few toy projects and I'd like to know whether this is worth checking out. I love Tauri but Rust has a very steep learning curve for me (as a mainly frontend web developer), for basically everything I want to do I have to resort to Claude/ChatGPT. Fortunately they're quite good at writing (not so complex) Rust code.
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