Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by app4soft 1804 days ago
> a cross platform

Not a cross-platform, but JavaScript-extension with cross-platform Chromium browser bundled.

1 comments

As far as I can see there are Electron apps for all major desktop OSes, that's pretty much as cross-platform as it gets, for a desktop app.
Electron app is "JavaScript-app + Chromium browser (or any other browser)"

Without browser this "browser extension" (Web-app) could not run on any platform.

Electron is a runtime environment that evolved out of a browser, not a browser. This app doesn't have any browser functionality I can see, like open arbitrary websites, but it does have its own system menus, icon, it's directly executable by the OS. By that logic no software written in an interpreted language can never be cross-platform, you'll always need a runtime environment.
> but it does have its own system menus, icon,

Desktop files (on Linux & Windows) are just nothing than a text file with description/meta info and a link to local executable or any other sort of file* - that is NOT related in any way to executable at all.

> it's directly executable by the OS.

Because it is browser (Chromium) with a custom browser-extension by design.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework)