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Electron v5.0 Timeline

electronjs.org

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Re: Electron v5.0 Timeline

#41

Post by aserafini »

icelancer wrote: post #33
stabbles wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that would be very useful to have. Some runtime, or some central application, so that the user just has to download some HTML, CSS and Javascript -- not a complete copy of Electron each time. And if this application could be used to browse the internet when the user enters a URL, that would be useful too! Game changer!

Everyone likes this idea until the HTML, CSS, and JS are given the ability to change application menus and access the file system. Then oh no, we can't have that.

Instead we are encouraging users to download arbitrary binaries bundled with a browser that can be controlled and updated remotely. It’s not clear to me this is any safer.

Re: Electron v5.0 Timeline

#42

Post by felixrieseberg »

kethinov wrote: post #13

Does anyone know if the idea of creating a runtime mode for Electron is on the roadmap? (A runtime mode would be allowing multiple apps to share one installed Electron dependency rather than bundling Electron with every Electron app.)

Currently not on the roadmap – for what it's worth, the majority of apps perform their Electron updates at different times, so you'd still have the same number of binaries and files as you do today.

Re: Electron v5.0 Timeline

#43

Post by Renaud »

kethinov wrote: post #13

Does anyone know if the idea of creating a runtime mode for Electron is on the roadmap? (A runtime mode would be allowing multiple apps to share one installed Electron dependency rather than bundling Electron with every Electron app.)

Then you get into the issue of keeping apps and runtime in sync so you don't get issues with older apps not working well with a new version of the runtime required by newer apps...

You end-up having to keep multiple runtimes and hoping they don't step on each-other's toes...

After a while you're still downloading 200+MB runtimes to run your particular app that still requires Runtime 5.05 and hasn't been updated to work with Runtime 6.12 that is required for newer updates of an app that used to work with Runtime 5.84...

Maybe a better idea would be to make Electron's install specific to each app and only include the bits you actually need so it's a 30MB bundle instead?

Just wondering if calling for a runtime isn't going to make things worse in the long run. It 's already often a pain to install an app that target any framework version in particular that may not be installed or may conflict on some user's target machines. Sometimes it's unavoidable, but I'm wondering if this is really the case here.

Re: Electron v5.0 Timeline

#44

Post by nikivi »

aportnoy wrote: post #16
briandear wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d rather Slack just stop using electron and write a real native app; they can certainly afford it. Meanwhile, Slack remains an incredible resource hog.

Slack takes 5-7 seconds to start up and connect on an ultra low latency 300 Mbit connection. I really wish there were a native app on Mac.

There is:

https://www.sblack.online

Re: Electron v5.0 Timeline

#45

Post by felixrieseberg »

yodon wrote: post #4

Looking over the donors page, I'm pretty amazed at slack's absence. Ditto for Microsoft Teams. Way to give back to the community.

Hi, Felix from Slack's Electron team here.

Slack co-maintains Electron together with GitHub, employing multiple core maintainers full-time, contracting those who can't join us full-time. We've also just hosted (and paid for) the first Electron conference. We're also maintaining a fairly large number of electron-userland modules.

tl;dr: That page might be misleading, we're investing heavily in Electron.

Re: Electron v5.0 Timeline

#47

Post by pjmlp »

chaosprophet wrote: post #32
pjmlp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cough, PWA. https://docs.microsoft.com/de-de/microsoft-edge/progressive-...

Do PWAs allow you to do things like modify application menus, access the file system etc?

If you bothered to read the link I posted, you would see that PWAs are native apps in UWP with full access to the same APIs as .NET and C++ have, if distributed via the store.

Same applies to PWAs on ChromeOS (naturally given its nature), and Google is ramping up the same capabilities on Android with their initial release of TWA.

Yep, there are a few OSes currently left out, it is up to their masters to follow Microsoft and Google's footsteps.

Re: Electron v5.0 Timeline

#48

Post by basil-rash »

jointhefuture wrote: post #27
basil-rash wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which makes me wonder: where do the donations actually go? It looks like the total amount is less than 15k, so everything donated is very easily overshadowed by MSFT's contributions, and I don't see any hints at a payment-for-contributions program on the electron github.

The donations go by paying the salaries of most of the top electron devs since they work for github which is owned by Microsoft.

The donations do not come remotely close to paying even a single person's salary.

Re: Electron v5.0 Timeline

#49

Post by matharmin »

kethinov wrote: post #13

Does anyone know if the idea of creating a runtime mode for Electron is on the roadmap? (A runtime mode would be allowing multiple apps to share one installed Electron dependency rather than bundling Electron with every Electron app.)

You can use Chrome + NodeJS as the shared runtime instead of Electron, using an approach such as this: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo

You still need to bundle a copy of NodeJS with your app if you're not targeting developers, but that's much smaller.

Of course, this still has many of the issues that a shared copy of Electron will have - you need to make sure that your app stays compatible as Chrome is updated. The HTML/JS side is typically not an issue, but the devtools protocol that you need for this does get breaking changes now and then.

Re: Electron v5.0 Timeline

#50

Post by sterlind »

aserafini wrote: post #19
stabbles wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that would be very useful to have. Some runtime, or some central application, so that the user just has to download some HTML, CSS and Javascript -- not a complete copy of Electron each time. And if this application could be used to browse the internet when the user enters a URL, that would be useful too! Game changer!

Yes great idea! The different applications (or URLs) could be opened simultaneously and displayed as ‘tabs’ for the user to manage in the central application.

I get the joke, but an Electron "player" daemon seems like a decent idea. It could manage getting the right runtime versions, installing apps, deduping assets and granting permissions.

It'd be a sort of cross-platform Google Play Services.

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