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by chrisstpierre 2569 days ago
I think that having just one common ui system makes a lot of sense. We want web apps to work as well as Native applications, and vise-versa.

I support the concept of Electron, but my question is - exactly why is it so bloated? Doesn’t it come with a built-in Chromium? Why is that? Wouldn’t it make more sense if it used the machine’s default browser engine? You would need to look out for different browser versions, but we are already doing that for the web anyways.

If not that... then maybe a single electron-specific chromium engine that is shared across electron apps.
2 comments
deeringc 2568 days ago
On Windows that currently means MSHTML which, depending on your OS version means some variant of IE. Not even Microsoft pages support IE properly anymore. Also, bloated here tends to mean runtime cost, RAM and CPU use, not disk use which is what you are solving for. Some browsers are definitely worse than others in this respect but running several instances of a full browser stack is not exactly light for any of the major browser engines.
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SomeOldThrow 2568 days ago
> We want web apps to work as well as Native applications

This is fundamentally impossible.

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chrisstpierre 2568 days ago
That’s not what I mean, really. Chrome book already has a non-negligible market share. Practically everything is a “web app” already. Sure, there are going to be use cases for lower level native software, but in reference to Electron I think it’s obvious that we are better off getting things to run better in the first place. Obviously Browsers weren’t originally designed to work this way, but it’s just how things have turned out. And developers are very familiar with html/css/JavaScript.

But of course getting the major browsers to play along has always been slow Microsoft as mentioned already.

But I understand why it makes sense to skip Electron in its current state

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JonAtkinson 2568 days ago
Why?
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stingraycharles 2568 days ago
Not the parent, but I suppose he is referring to the fact that it’s another layer of indirection, and solve different problems.

It’s akin to saying “we want C to work as well as ASM”, which is kind of like comparing apples to oranges.

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