Show HN: Nativefier – Wrap any web page natively

Re:Show HN: Nativefier – Wrap any web page natively by skewedlines on Wednesday January 20, 2016 @12:01PM (#10939463)

I do agree with you on that, and there should be some form of Chromium that can be shared across applications to reduce the bloat of such packaged apps. Perhaps this is an issue with the architecture of Electron itself, which requires all such apps to contain their own version of Chromium?

I wanted easy cross platform compatibility with minimal code, and Electron seemed like a good choice across for apps across Windows, OSX and Linux.

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Re:Show HN: Nativefier – Wrap any web page natively by mwcampbell on Wednesday January 20, 2016 @12:10PM (#10939535)

On OS X, a little Cocoa application in Objective-C using the system WebKit framework would probably do the trick.

On Linux, a little GTK application in C using WebKitGTK would probably work.

On Windows... I don't know. I know from firsthand that embedding the IE engine via the WebBrowser ActiveX control really sucks. I'm going to see if the WebKit WinCairo port is any good these days.

If we must use CHromium, then the Chromium Embedded Framework is worth a look. It's a DLL, so in principle, it can be shared between applications. You'd still need some platform-specific code to create the window containing CEF, though.

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Re:Show HN: Nativefier – Wrap any web page natively by monkmartinez on Wednesday January 20, 2016 @01:22PM (#10940149)

All these "little native applications" require lots of work. If I want to share these "little applications" with people that do not share my OS, I am forced to make at least 2 different versions of the "little application"... then maintain them.

Good enough, is good enough. Yes, the web is not as performant as native... the question becomes; is it good enough? The bonus in wrapping Chrome is that I don't have to dive into 3 or more system level API's to get a "little application" up and running.

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