There are a number of problems with locally-run websites.

One is that TLS is married to DNS, and no third-party CA would issue a certificate for localhost. TlS with self-signed certs generated on the spot becomes easy to forge.

Another is that no web browser suppoorts Unix domain sockets or a Windows equivalent as a an access protocol. You are stuck with IP-based access, wee above.

Third is that access to the OS is limited or forbidden inside the browser, for a good reason. Want to run a locally installed compiler from within your web IDE? Tough luck.

Electron solves all of these problems. It doesn't do it in the best way imaginable, but in some cases just a web site cannot be a replacement.

You mean, "website with native API's and (optionally) custom native chrome".

Developers don't use electron because it'll get its own browser engine instance.

Depends, there is a bunch of Electron apps that work just fine as websites (e.g. Slack, Spotify, Microsoft Teams, etc. As far as I know). I personally prefer running those in a browser tab to both save resources and benefit from privacy enhancing tools like content blockers, etc. I would be curious to know how many of the Electron apps actually need these extra native APIs.

Some of those you listed have extra features with electron. I was just being sarcastic with my remark. Like I don’t believe you can screen share with slack via a browser for example.

> Like I don’t believe you can screen share with slack via a browser for example.

If you can't, it's not the browser's fault. I can definitely screen share in Jitsi from the browser, so there's no technical reason Slack shouldn't be able to do the same thing.

You can show your screen but you cannot pass control.

Well, There is Apache Cordova. Cordova uses built-in webview. It also support windows and mac, but it's not as popular as electron because its api is not as rich as electron.

Electron supports native V8 extensions that are really fast. Cordova (at the time I tried it) only supported message passing which is very slow. Sufficient for many applications but for some it won't cut it.