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by kitsunesoba 3969 days ago
Is there any reason why electron bundles an entire copy of Chromium when the system-bundled WebKit provides 98% of the exact same functionality? Using system WebKit instead would make the final binaries FAR smaller plus developers would be able to take advantage of all the energy efficiency goodness that Apple has baked in.
2 comments

I guess because otherwise they would have to have a different code base for Windows, Linux and OSX. They are probably relying on Chromium to solve the multiplatform aspect of this.
And probably because it's more "stable" in the sense that the bundled chromium won't change independent of the rest of the software.

Plus storage is cheap and plentiful, and while webkit is pretty close to chromium, it's not identical and then they would need to support 2 separate "platforms", even if only for that 2% of differences.

Good idea. Hopefully someday electron will provide an optional feature where mac downloads can drop chromium and use the system webkit.