Amen to this. There was the open source project that was essentially a Gecko version of Electron but of course it was very alpha and eventually was deprecated and abandoned.
Perhaps the gold standard of Electron would allow you to choose the engine and then build a native/browser app based on that.
You might be interested in GeckoView [1]
I was going to say that Servo was going to include an implementation of the Chromium Embedding Framework API but apparently that feature has been dropped for lack of use: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.servo/5M...
Re:Goodbye, EdgeHTML
by pseudalopex on Thursday December 06, 2018 @07:27PM
(#18623991)
> Electron has made building cross platform desktop applications a lot easier
For people who have web development experience, yes.
It's made building cross-platform desktop applications that are just wrappers for existing web-apps down-right trivial (and no web-dev experience required there.)
And that case applies more often than you'd think. For example, the Spotify app, the Slack app†, the various Facebook Messenger "clients", etc.
† the Slack app is built with http://macgapproject.github.io/, but it's pretty much the same thing.
Re:Goodbye, EdgeHTML
by AlexCoventry on Thursday December 06, 2018 @11:36PM
(#18625173)
I don't understand why the slack app exists. Why would I want to run another browser for a chat application?
I use it because my window manager manages windows better than any browser manages tabs.
I've noticed most people in my organisation hate the idea of having work chat in a browser tab. They really liked having a separate app.
It doesn't help that the Windows default (not sure about Macintosh) is to group icons in the task bar, so your separate Browser window for chat makes you two-click to switch between browsing and chat.
> (not sure about Macintosh)
The macOS default is to have no taskbar at all, just a bunch of icons without text or context.
Re:Goodbye, EdgeHTML
by pseudalopex on Thursday December 06, 2018 @09:10PM
(#18624532)
That's true in a way, but it requires basically no non-web dev experience either. It's a different kind of "building".
Re:Goodbye, EdgeHTML
by austincheney on Friday December 07, 2018 @01:14AM
(#18625528)
It would be nice if there were a Node flavor that used SpiderMonkey as a choice to V8. Until that happens most of us are forced to use Chrome related technology no matter how much more we may prefer Mozilla tech.
The problem with that is to make a node.js compatible engine you need to write and maintain a compatibility layer that mirrors the V8 API which I can completely understand a Dev team not wanting to undergo.
They used to support it, but it was killed to prioritize firefox development (and couple of years later they stopped developing mozilla suite).
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.embeddin...
otoh Webkit was originally developed as part of iOS, so embedding was required
WebKit was a fork from KDE and was used to build Safari before iOS existed.
right, KHTML is still a valid option under linux to build apps. But that's getting so much less (no?) attention from web developers
I bet the ipad prototype from early 2000s actually ran some version of osx&safari
Whether you think it's a good or bad move, Electron has made building cross platform desktop applications a lot easier. It's a shame it must use Chromium and V8.
In fairness Mozilla used to have XUL [1] until it was stopped [2], presumably because not enough people were using it?
1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL 2. https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/FAQ#Doesn.E2.80.99t_F...