I've been thinking of something along those lines for years. I hope your project gets traction. I'd love to develop with web technologies exclusively, but what we've been doing with Electron is crazy. Imagine loading a whole new Win32 or Carbon/Cocoa for every app you open.

I can understand the inconsistencies and lack of feature support that could emerge from using a different browser engine for each OS (Webkit/Edge), but there should at least be away for Electron apps to share Chromium/Node runtimes between them.

Isn't this basically what PWAs will hopefully solve?

Rather than Spotify, Slack, Discord, ... all coming with their own Electron bundle they can be packaged up as a PWA and use the browser as the runtime environment along with all the nice offline stuff, safe OS integration for notifications, sandboxed file system access, ability to still do some work in S0i3 (aka Modern Standy on Windows), etc.

Or am I totally wrong about this? I am not a web developer so I could be :)

Bonus question: how would this work for things like Atom and VS Code that are electron based. Could they become a PWA?

All good questions and some things will probably be well addressed by PWA or whatever we decide to call JavaScript rich webpages by then.

But some UI issues, like the lack of a proper menu, browser's chrome and address bar will still be a turn off. Besides, having unrestriced access to the user's drive is not something a web page should be able to do and is a must for something like a text editor.

There is BrowserFS https://github.com/jvilk/BrowserFS

There's no reason a text editor, or most applications really, need unrestricted access to a user's disk. They have to prompt the user with a file open dialog anyway, so you may as well let the OS handle that and pass an fd/handle across the boundary for you.

What if you are using a smart IDE like editor that, for instance, minimizes and concatenates your css and js files?

It’s going to want access to all files in that directory, not only the ones you are editing.

tbh that doesn't sound like a huge problem to solve. Setup some working folders that the PWA has R/W access to and leave it at that.

Browser chrome and address bar are not an issue as I believe a PWA can run in a generic application Windows with it's own icon, etc. Similar to if you have used a Chrome Web App in the past? Unless you go looking for it you wouldn't know it was running within a Chrome process.

Not sure how menus are handled. A standard menu API would seem to make the most sense to me?

What is "PWA"?

Progressive Web Apps, but I honestly can't explain exactly what they are.

It's the combination of various technologies helping make websites which pretend (poorly) they are applications.

Hey, I saw the post that got the ball rolling on Electrino and I've been meaning to reach out to you. Do you have any tips on where to start on porting Electrino to Linux?

Electron-like "web" apps (that follow W3C standards) seem to be the future, and I'd love to help out however I can.

Great! I use desktop Linux regularly and I have some ideas where the Linux port could start off. Would you drop me an email at [email protected] and let’s talk?

Why wouldn’t google just ship a “libchrome” shared library so that they could share it?

They do, it's called Google Chrome.

Because google is more inclined to break their own APIs without concern of the integrations of others.

Adobe AIR was an effort to create a common runtime for similar things... wouldn't mind seeing a few OS vendors coming together to support something similar, but on the flip side, I don't want to be stuck with Node 4.0's API in 2024.