[colordrops]

It's a native binary executable with standard access to system APIs, so in the technical sense, yes.

[Qwertious]

By that logic, if I fork chromium and make a custom version of it that's hard-coded to start up HN in the first tab, then I've made a native HN app.

[MadcapJake]

No, you've "made" a native browser that opens HN in the first tab.

[radisb]

By that logic Postman native is a native browser hardcoded to open only one tab and load Postman's javascript code upon start-up

[MadcapJake]

Basically this is true but the browser (Electron) is designed to be single-purpose (your app) and has pathways to the filesystem that you can't get in a web browser.

Also, it is treated as an application by the OS rather than a Chrome window (and all the benefits that come with that shift).

[Antrikshy]

But you won't have access to the file system unless you further modify it.

[josephg]

That just makes the platform native, which doesn't say anything at all. Presumably the app itself is still written in javascript, so its not native at all - its just bundling its own (native) copy of chrome.

[colordrops]

So are you saying anything with a runtime is not native, even if embedded in an executable? Is a go app native?

[meditationapp]

Does a go app use the native toolkit?

QT isn't native either.

[microtonal]

Actually, Qt (as in Qt Widgets) is a peculiar case. Qt draws its own widgets, but on some platforms uses native theming APIs to draw widgets (e.g. HITheme in macOS[1]). Though they are apparently experimenting with native widgets now [2].

So I'd say Qt is more native than e.g. Electron, but it is definitely not completely native. Except on Linux of course.

[1] http://doc.qt.io/qt-4.8/qmacstyle.html#details

[2] http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/02/06/native-look-feel/

[meditationapp]

The technical sense meaning it's not interpreting some random scripting language and rendering with HTML/dom?

Because that's the meaningful sense.