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by Rebelgecko 2071 days ago
Why is sciter so popular with antivirus companies?
1 comments

For many reasons.

Compact and manageable UI layer is the first. Full Sciter build for one platform/target is 50 seconds or less. Electron/Chromium builds are about tens of hours as I've been told.

Yet this https://sciter.com/from-skeuomorph-to-flat-ui-evolution-of-o...

is the same app that uses the same UI engine since 2007.

UI maintenance all these years is the matter of updating CSS declarations. Yet you always know that it will be HTML/CSS people that can do your UI in future.

> For many reasons.

[snip reasons]

But why AV companies specifically?

> AV companies specifically ...

AV/security specific reasons:

First serious customer was Symantec with their Norton Antivirus. Norton AV 2007 was their first version that used Sciter (named HTMLayout then). And Norton AV was market leader at that time.

Symantec did first security audit of Sciter source code.

You (AV vendor) have UI engine that fits most of UI requirements (lightweight, supports i18n by nature, flexible to screen resolution, HTML/CSS is well known in UI) and, which is most valuable, secure. So decision is quite obvious.

Yet, psychological aspect.

AV product must look modern at any time. User may not trust AV app that looks outdated - that rises suspicion that it is not adequate to recent threats - so it must look modern. Therefore ability to modernize UI by CSS without touching anything else (happens at least once per year) is the key requirement. UI systems/frameworks that use designs nailed down to pixel grids are too expensive on the long run in such circumstances.

Interesting. Was this a market segment that you targeted deliberately from the outset, or was it a happy accident that you subsequently leveraged?
What order are those in? The top left (first one) is the best UI IMO. Lol.