It's incredible what can be done but can be far less responsive than the scaleform it replaces, but this may partially be due to it being a third party mod to the game.
Wails does that: https://wails.io/
Tauri also does that: https://tauri.app/
That does help with the app sizes quite a bit: https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso...
Sadly it doesn’t change the memory usage much so the technology is still inherently wasteful, but on a certain level it feels like a lost battle - because web technologies often feel like the choice of least resistance when you want GUI software that will run on a bunch of platforms while not being annoying to develop (from the perspective of your run of the mill dev).
It's not just how things look, though, there are a ton of differences between browsers in terms of how things behave, too.
- Blink for Windows/Qt hosts.
- WebKit for macOS/GTK hosts.
I remember when web developers actually gave a damn. Just call yourselves Chrome developers because that's what you are now.
Like frontend developers do all the time? Why would this be an issue for apps but not on web? Reminds me of the old ”our website works best in Internet Explorer” banners.
The webviews on windows, Linux (gtk) macOS, iOS, Android all support modern CSS and are basically identical. Speaking from experience.
Interesting resource, thanks!
Was not expecting the start up values for Tauri, they're abysmal ._. Welp, at least the executables are small.
By this, do you mean something like a C/C++/Rust API to the DOM?
Why would an "embedded browser engine" be any better? Electron after all is also a browser engine, and that's what makes it slow and bloated compared to native UI, not the embedded part (by which I asume you mean something like a browser engine wrapper widget).
>2. It has no native DOM API bindings so it takes even more ram and cpu to compile and run JS quickly.
Huh?
There are legacy parts of browser layout that make it impossible(?) to optimize some rendering while being standards compatible. If you just chose a subset that is fast to implement and focused on being subset you narrow the scope of the project and enable optimizations.
Electron has to implement everything chrome has to support even though the apps running in it will never touch it.
Also web engines have to be heavily sandboxed because you cannot allow internet code break out of the sandbox.
Native apps shipped with electron already ship Node and just waste resources sandboxing stuff with security layers.
Does your desktop app need a gyro, webrtc and gamepad support? But they're loaded anyway.
I doubt those impose very much (if any) overhead for just being present but unused. In any case, those aren't the things that the OP was talking about; there are plenty of layout-related standards like floats that are almost never used in modern web apps yet inhibit or prevent many optimizations that could potentially significantly increase rendering performance. For a more extreme example, imagine how much faster layout rendering could be if you removed all types of layout other than grid—you'd be able to remove a bunch of checks and all the code that handles edge cases, significantly simplifying the happy path.
Nobody (to my knowledge) has done this because it's not as simple as forking Chromium and removing code. Without the mentioned optimizations, I don't think you'd see much benefit.
Embedded browser engines though are either wrappers for Webkit and Blink (thus also including the "legacy parts of browser layout that make it impossible(?) to optimize some rendering") OR simplistic web rendering engines that are not as capable as Chrome/Webkit for layout and not compatible with all modern CSS/HTML features.
Huge number of Enterprise/productivity apps are shipped on Electron.
It's hard to beat the value proposition on the business side if you need a website for the product.
* MAUI: Windows, macOS, Android, iOS.
* Avalonia: Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS, browsers.
Personally - I collect quite a few for different things. I almost always have at least chrome, firefox, ungoogled-chromium, and - recently - ladybird installed.
Not to mention a couple different chromium versions for various electron apps (slack, discord, etcher, bitwarden, vscode, postman, etc).
Different browsers do different things well, and electron does the "desktop app" niche better than the others right now. In the same way that ladybird does the "not tracked by corporations" part, and firefox does the "still supports manifest v2 extensions" part.
You can complain all you'd like (and I recognize you from other places hating on electron) and it's fine, but it doesn't change incentive structures for the folks deploying these, and as a full time linux user... I am SO fucking happy to have all the BS apps my company requires "just work" on my computers because of electron.
If you don't want to use software developed with Electron... more power to ya. Go make that choice. Leave the rest of us out of it.
From my side... it'd be great if we can make electron suck less (and trust me, I definitely agree that we can), but right now... it's still a pretty huge win.
Everything else, if there is a Web app, then I use the browser, no need to ship it alongside every single application out there.
It is like those garbage mobile apps, that are exactly the same website that I can access via the Webbrowser, packaged inside a "native" app.
And I say this as someone that works primarly in distributed systems and Web.
Sciter exists: https://sciter.com/
And it indeed is great for UI.
A company that I'm advising is using it for their industrial IoT control dashboards, and it's great for that purpose.
oh neat, I like learning about “secret weapons” like lisp/erlang
> for some of the most prominent antivirus products on the market: Norton Antivirus and Internet Security, Comodo Internet Security, ESET Antivirus, BitDefender Antivirus, and others.
I saw that sentence ending differently in my head...
It just doesn’t seem like a very strong claim, that all these products which don’t really hinge on having great (or even good) UIs consider Sciter to be their secret weapon.
A comparable ecosystem is QML in QT, but Sciter is an order of magnitude leaner and faster.
My friends are using it for an industrial controller that can boot in half a second after a power outage.
I'm not saying that QML is bad, it just is much more massive.
Well browsers are pretty damn heavy for an app that won't use 99% of its functionality. Maybe some of this can be amortized with clever distro work so apps don't have to ship the whole runtime but that hasn't happened yet.
(In fact, it's a little odd to me electron is based on chrome rather than the WebKit that actually ships with macos.... you should be able to ship that sort of app with a few megabytes)
I'd also rather eat glass than be stuck with javascript, easily the most frustrating ecosystem I've ever worked with by a very wide margin. Just the language is ok, but the build pipelines/bundling/transpilation/polyfillls is absolutely miserable to work with and lack of a decent standard library really hurts. It's crazy how we've basically lifted up the concepts of compilation and linking c objects to the world of javascript, just to ship code in a language the browser already fully supports.
Maybe WASM will help but my understanding its use of the DOM is quite awkward and still requires javascript usage.
I wish we'd get direct DOM access from WASM anytime but I have little hope.
Surely it would be nice, but it's not a real deal breaker
I think Facebook had the same thoughts at some point and they invested heavily in web tech. Later when that backfired (because of performance issues) they started the React Native project.
I think that an embedded web rendering strategy for UI within the context of a framework that provides other native interfaces may indeed become a bigger thing
We also know it’s not a case of just Apples native tech being better because MacOS has truly lost to webtech, hard to even name an app built in the last 5-10 years by a 3rd party in Apples own tech. Everything is just Electron or cross frameworks.
Personally I love truly native Mac apps but it’s certainly clear no one else cares and electron is enough.
https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...
(except through the, purposefully onerous, EU alternative regulations. Which apple charges apps a per-install fee for. Normal apps can only use Webkit, without any plugins or changes)
Was 5-10 years ago was the last time you used MacOS? Or do I live in a bubble? Because your statement sits opposite of my perception of things. Maybe I don't use enough apps to say for sure. I don't use most of these, but here are some that I can think of off-hand. You can tell me if these are too old, some of them may be I don't know.
Starting with ones recently seen on HN:
- pISSStream
- Ice
- Ghostty
- Stats
- NetNewsWire
- Wealthfolio
- Orion Browser
- Iina
- Dato, Velja + most others from Sindre Sorhus
- Proxyman
- Transmission
- SwiftBar
- AppLite
- MonitorControl
- BetterDisplay
- Maccy
- CodeEdit
- Does HandBrake count?
- Zed?
There's also a number of sites/lists dedicated to these types of apps. Sometimes it feels like there are too many apps even.
It just happens to be the most widespread by accident, because hyperlinked documents - HTML - became huge and then more and more UI elements were bolted on top of it. And suddenly it became the goto, because the plattform run everywhere.
But it is still a ugly mess underneath and you might be right, that it is the future, but it is not a great one. I hope a great one will surface one day and then we can start new with something sane.
"I'm excited for the new crop of browser engines because they could fix those deficiencies"
And I cannot see what fixing those deficiencies could mean other, than throwing most of the standard away. It doesn't mean all of it needs to be thrown away. WebAudio API, WebGPU, etc. all became great standards. But simple UI elements, like a slider or color picker are still just ugly and impossible to make beautiful and behave sane, besides making a new one by hand, or using a libary from someone who did that. But - with WebGPU especially - I am excited for the possibility to build a sane framework on top of some subsets of the browsers capabilities.
How do people imagine rendering is implemented in browsers to begin with?
NoesisGUI: https://www.noesisengine.com/xamltoy/0e2a866b60bc2b9a724b4c6...
And it even has a studio for paying clients which makes designing a GUI trivial. https://www.noesisengine.com/studio/
The studio is made using their own GUI library and its sleek af. Not even QT holds a candle to it. Would have been nice to have such a project in the open source world.
Anyways, to each their own.
If you want to criticize .NET, you should do better. We're really short on critics who can produce something substantiated. So far all the replies are of incredibly poor SNR.
If you give me an example use case, I would be able to tell you what I would use, however.
In my observation, Electron's deficiencies go beyond these two. One glaring issue is the UX not conforming to the native OS guidelines/conventions, including things like keyboard based navigation and OS feature integration.
Give me a native app and an Electron (or similar app, including the abominations that are Catalyst apps on macOS), and I'll choose native apps every time.
"But Electron!" Yes, Electron hasn't taken the world by storm because it has two huge deficiencies: 1. It takes an enormous amount of resources including ram and disk. 2. It has no native DOM API bindings so it takes even more ram and cpu to compile and run JS quickly.
I'm excited for the new crop of browser engines because they could fix those deficiencies, opening up browser tech to app developers without hugely compromising the experience.