[gyrgtyn]

> I can’t quite figure it out, why do people prefer writing Electron apps as opposed of having a thin backend layer that communicates with the frontend in the user’s existing browser via websockets or long polling or whatever.

that's not possible. For one thing, you need https.

[Supermancho]

A one-and-done installer for an existing browser is too sandboxed to work as he describes, afaik.

If you ran local code and added some plugins with permissions, it would be possible, maybe.