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Comment by iddan | Hacker News Reader

Another great reason to migrate Electron to WebKit. With WebKit and JSC Electron will be faster and will use a zero amount of RAM and battery!

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We shouldn't be migrating Electron to anything… we should be getting rid of it. Electron is a cop-out for mediocre dev teams to make mediocre desktop apps. The result is a world where we run apps like Spotify and Slack are the main battery-killers because their engineering teams were too lazy to make a real native app.

You assume that if there wasn't Electron that those apps would exist at all.

Maybe if they can't invest in proper native apps, they shouldn't exist. Electron is a scourge - clock speeds are not getting any faster, and tying a user application to a single-threaded execution model would have been recognized as suicidal a decade ago.

Can't you just not use them if you don't want to, rather than wishing all other people wouldn't be able to use them either?

I can wish for something better. It's frustrating when I look at what desktop applications looked like and ran like ten or fifteen years ago, and how little has appreciably changed now, beside ballooning resource requirements.

I think what fooey meant (and what I agree with) is that what has changed now is that those apps exist at all: compared to ten or fifteen years ago, more apps are written now, they work better and on more platforms, and they are updated more frequently. Tools like Electron play a part in that.

Sure, we could wish that more effort would be spent while producing just as much. Realistically, though, that's not going to happen, and that's not due to people being lazy.

Depends how skillful those developers are, beyond web stack tech.

Dunno about zero. Sounds hard.

I think what OP means is that instead of bundling a copy of Chromium, just use the system-provided WebKit and JSC, which is already loaded into memory.

But Windows and Linux doesn't have Webkit by default

Doesn't Electrino basically try this?

Currently it looks like Electrino only supports macOS. Doesn't it sort of defeat one of the purposes of using a web-based framework for desktop apps if it's not even cross-platform?

Sure thing, but I thought the idea was to use Edge on Windows?

I mean, the difference between rewriting an app and tweaking to compile on a different toolkit is not trivial, but I see your point

It's still web based. You can just use one wrapper for one platform and one for another. A little extra effort, but if the engine makes it worth it then why not?

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