Electron for the Mac App Store | Hacker News Reader

Electron for the Mac App Store

saschawise.com

37 pointsxwsaw8 comments

Is there any reason why electron bundles an entire copy of Chromium when the system-bundled WebKit provides 98% of the exact same functionality? Using system WebKit instead would make the final binaries FAR smaller plus developers would be able to take advantage of all the energy efficiency goodness that Apple has baked in.

I guess because otherwise they would have to have a different code base for Windows, Linux and OSX. They are probably relying on Chromium to solve the multiplatform aspect of this.

And probably because it's more "stable" in the sense that the bundled chromium won't change independent of the rest of the software.

Plus storage is cheap and plentiful, and while webkit is pretty close to chromium, it's not identical and then they would need to support 2 separate "platforms", even if only for that 2% of differences.

Good idea. Hopefully someday electron will provide an optional feature where mac downloads can drop chromium and use the system webkit.

So you are 16 year old, already two years on HN and have an app in the Mac App Store that Apple qualified as 'You must be at least 17 years old to download this app'.

Respect !!!

[0] RESTer - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rester/id1013270103?ls=1&mt=...

Why does Apple impose that age limit? I clicked on the warning, but it redirected me to a generic ad for the Mac App Store.

But... Why? This isn't explained at all in the article. Why would we need to run a 4 hour long build process? I could google it, sure. But the article should probably also mention that. Anyway, if anyone cares to enlighten me...

I'm not completely sure why the build time is so long, but I have a few guesses. I think that Chromium is compiling for many many different platforms when it builds which would explain the huge required space. In addition it is compiling all of its dependencies along with it, instead of linking them like so many other libraries do. And the 3rd thing is that my computer is not that fast.

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