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A comment on Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you re... by sametmax on Saturday December 08, 2018 @01:36PM (#18636697)
JS had nowhere the popularity it had today. At the time, creating a desktop app in Javascript was not regarded as serious. The reason electron became popular is because so many people from other fields (designers, integraters, students...) learn programming through copy / pasting JS and wanted JS for everything. Hence node. And now electron.
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Re:Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you re... by zmix on Saturday December 08, 2018 @01:59PM (#18636843)
Firefox, Thunderbird (and their spin offs) were all considered serious desktop apps. They all were written with XPFE/XULRunner.
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Re:Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you re... by TeMPOraL on Saturday December 08, 2018 @02:09PM (#18636910)
They didn't advertise that much, though. I only learned about XULRunner when I was trying out a keyboard-driven browser (Conkeror). Unlike Electron, XUL wasn't promoted.
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Re:Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you re... by zmix on Sunday December 09, 2018 @05:06PM (#18643582)
And that is the main reason, IMO. Mozilla Inc. never wanted to do more with it.
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Re:Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you re... by cztomsik on Saturday December 08, 2018 @02:21PM (#18636986)
uh, I wouldn't say electron got popular because of copy-pasting newbies.

webapp development is a lot of work and SPAs are actually even harder... and so is server development with node. I love javascript, yet I don't think it's suitable for everything.

electron got popular, because companies could reuse code and tooling, only for the cost of cpu & memory

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