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Comment by jwmerrill | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions using Electron or NW.js if you want to continue building apps on web technologies that need deeper platform access.

Is there a reason that those are worse options than Chrome apps?

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Each Electron/NW.js app will be packaged with a whole huge runtime.

It's not all bad - there's more freedom with these.

It's possible but it's not an easy switch. And god help you if you have to mix native code with Electron. Getting a node-gyp toolchain spun up on Windows is a complete and total nightmare. Add Electron and its very specific version of Node into the mix (which totally confused node-gyp) and it's really awful.

Nah, it's not that hard, not sure why you had so much trouble

Source: Have written many many Electron node modules

It used to be hard, but when you have tried it last time? These days its as simple as hitting.

    npm install --global node-gyp
    npm install --global --production windows-build-tools

There's also the alternative of switching to a Chrome extension, no?

Different sets of APIs[1]. For example Socket, USB are only App APIs. Though I guess they could roll app APIs into extensions… hopefully. Socket API especially.

Only Chrome apps work on Chrome OS and developing a Chrome app is way easier: Chrome takes care of the back-end and Google offers an app store.

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