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Re:Electron considered harmful by cdnsteve on Thursday November 24, 2016 @12:18PM (#13031399)
If electron apps had a smarter way to manage chrome core as a dependency, the file size would be peanuts. Every apps is download on the same bundled core. Once this happens you won't have 100mb sizes. An intelligent installer could check core, if not installed download and install otherwise use what's on the system.
Re:Electron considered harmful by Longhanks on Thursday November 24, 2016 @12:23PM (#13031427)
What if there was a centralized way of accessing HTML + CSS + JS applications? Instead of installing apps, you could just... "download" the necessary files to execute them? Perhaps even on demand from centralized.. "servers"?
Re:Electron considered harmful by detaro on Thursday November 24, 2016 @12:35PM (#13031520)
I really don't want APIs to freely access the filesystem, other processes etc in my browser. And my applications to work offline.

I haven't seen many examples of people using Electron to make applications that really should be web apps instead, but more for packaging web apps with native enhancements. Often I'd prefer a "proper" native app, pushing even more features in the browser IHMO is not the answer.

Re:Electron considered harmful by tscs37 on Thursday November 24, 2016 @12:47PM (#13031596)
>I really don't want APIs to freely access the filesystem, other processes etc in my browser. And my applications to work offline.

Ctrl+S -> Save whole webpage

alternatively get the Webpages source code.

Re:Electron considered harmful by josho on Thursday November 24, 2016 @12:37PM (#13031532)
> What if there was a centralized way of accessing HTML + CSS + JS applications

There is. The major OSs provide APIs to access the platform browser. The downside is you need a platform specific shim to set this up using native code. So, developers need to step outside of their JS worldview for a few days to avoid that 200mb app size penalty.

If you are building a platform agnostic app then I understand the value of Electron to avoid that work across each platform. But, it seems several of those Electron apps aren't even platform agnostic, so why not build the platform specific shim and be a better citizen on my hardware.

edit: I'm daft

Re:Electron considered harmful by mnx on Thursday November 24, 2016 @01:01PM (#13031698)
He was ironically talking about the web.
Re:Electron considered harmful by nmca on Thursday November 24, 2016 @12:43PM (#13031569)
Aha, he missed the joke...
Re:Electron considered harmful by jasonjayr on Thursday November 24, 2016 @12:37PM (#13031535)
For YEARS I remember having to chase down the VBRUN{100|200|300}.dll runtimes for the Visual Basic runtimes.

Now that internet is everywhere, couldn't Electron:

1) Setup a common bootstrap mechanism so it's version agnostic 2) Check for the declared version of the app 3) If online (and allowed by system policy) check if there are security issues, or updates for the needed version 4) Advise user where to download the update, or (again, if allowed by policy) allow the user the proceed with the installation?

With some magic to allow a 'side-by-side' distribution of the Electron runtime, on good-ol' durable media, wouldn't this go far to minimize the size of the distributions of these Electron apps? You could have a system with one (or more if nessecary) versions of the runtime, and multiple apps using that runtime (with isolated profiles, of course ...)

Re:Electron considered harmful by RandomOpinion on Thursday November 24, 2016 @01:41PM (#13031984)
>If electron apps had a smarter way to manage chrome core as a dependency, the file size would be peanuts. Every apps is download on the same bundled core. Once this happens you won't have 100mb sizes. An intelligent installer could check core, if not installed download and install otherwise use what's on the system.

Oooh, we could give this core a snazzy name like "Flash" or "Silverlight" or something too.

Once again, history repeats itself.

Re:Electron considered harmful by ssivark on Thursday November 24, 2016 @02:22PM (#13032212)
Isn't that what they call a web browser? For visiting websites and using web apps.