[horsawlarway]

> The web is more fickle and opaque than the App Store.

You have some examples of what you mean by fickle? I'm not really sure I understand.

In basically every situation I can think of, the browser is less fickle, more consistent, and more backwards compatible than an app store.

The only benefit to using an app over a website is offline access - which is moot if you don't have the app installed already, since the app download will certainly be bigger than the page load, and it's also the problem electron nicely solves for those cases.

[zepto]

> In basically every situation I can think of, the browser is less fickle, more consistent, and more backwards compatible than an app store.

There is no guarantee of anything from any web app. Your data can be used for anything the provider likes. There are literally no guidelines.

> The only benefit to using an app over a website is offline access - which is moot if you don't have the app installed already

In almost every single use case you will have the app installed already.

Electron solves literally no problems with web apps. Electron apps are not web apps and do not run in the browser. Web apps do not use electron. The fact that some code may be portable between the two is irrelevant to the user.

[horsawlarway]

> There is no guarantee of anything from any web app. Your data can be used for anything the provider likes. There are literally no guidelines.

This is a feature, not a problem. To add, it's also not true at all. The browser sandbox is the gating.

>Electron apps are not web apps and do not run in the browser.

This makes me think you don't actually know what electron is.

Have a good one.

[zepto]

> The browser sandbox is the gating.

You really think the browser sandbox limits what the website can do with the data on their servers?

> This makes me think you don't actually know what electron is.

Do you think electron is a web browser?

I think it’s a toolkit that let’s you use JavaScript, HTML and CSS to build a standalone app.

Web apps aren’t defined by the programming language they use. They are defined by the fact that they run on the web - I.e. in a browser talking to web servers.

[horsawlarway]

No disrespect, but I think you're either uninformed or misguided on the topic.

The renderer processes in Electron are literally "BrowserWindow" instances... https://www.electronjs.org/docs/api/browser-window

The whole process model for electron is almost identical to the process model for WebExtensions (a single process manages renderer processes, which are instances of browser window objects.).

I don't recommend this, but I've done it and it works - your whole electron app can be a main process that literally caches the resources from your site, and then displays them in a renderer view.

[zepto]

>No disrespect, but I think you're either uninformed or misguided on the topic.

No disrespect, but nope. Nothing you have said here contradicts what I said.

Electron is not a browser. It is a toolkit that lets you use web technologies to build standalone apps.

Any app can embed a JavaScript engine or web renderer and cache code from the web, even on iOS. That isn’t a special feature of electron.

[jcelerier]

> Any app can embed a JavaScript engine or web renderer and cache code from the web, even on iOS

and we would call that a browser

[horsawlarway]

> You really think the browser sandbox limits what the website can do with the data on their servers?

And that is different than the mobile app store, how, exactly?

Data you provide to a company is theirs to do with as they please - whether it was ingested through a Iphone app or a website makes absolutely zero difference.

[zepto]

The difference between App Store apps and web apps is that many App Store apps work on local files or files stored in iCloud that are never ingested by the company that provided the app.

This is not true of web apps.