Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

I would love to have the browser be a local "application server" on the desktop. Currently, people hate electron because shipping and running duplicate browsers is heavy-handed, insecure, and silly.

There's definitely a different feeling between having a running Discord/Slack tab vs. using a native app for it, if you're using it a lot. A native notification bar icon, shortcuts in the menus/app launchers, the app not exiting if i need to restart the browser, the app not being affected by extensions I install (adblockers, etc).

The app being separate from the browser is good. But it should still be the same engine running this. The same master process as well, possibly?

Either way, Electron has been a huge boon for apps being available natively on Linux and that's just awesome. I don't want to lose that.

View on HN

>Currently, people hate electron because shipping and running duplicate browsers is heavy-handed, insecure, and silly.

And because they are bad OS citizens. You can’t use the system’s spell checking, dictionary, undo/redo, shortcuts, abbreviations, better text rendering… the list goes on and on.

If it is a webapp, I can at least use Safari, which has none of those issues.

FWIW, Electron actually supports all of those things, except the text rendering engine.

Really? Never seen a well behaved textarea or input[text] in Chrome. Can you elaborate on how this could be done?

Works for me out of the box! spellchekc too.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/348mh6wlmuayflp/Screenshot%202018-...

You're right… kind of. For some reason it's not available throught contextual menu, like other apps, only in the Edit menu. https://imgur.com/a/2FDNDu4

And if the App forgets to expose that option (Skype, for instance), tough noogies.

> I would love to have the browser be a local "application server" on the desktop

Back in the days we called that a WebView.

And when MS made one with MSIE and used that in Windows, we sent the EU after them.

How times change, eh?

>And when MS made one with MSIE and used that in Windows, we sent the EU after them.

That was because they were a monopoly (among several other reasons, such as "bundling", threatening OEMs and so on).

Not because they offered webviews (which was totally irrelevant).

Iirc the embedding in the OS (aka the webview) was one of the major complaints.

But ... chromium is not embedded in the OS?

> And when MS made one with MSIE and used that in Windows, we sent the EU after them.

> How times change, eh?

That was a very short story.

Mine is a bit longer and includes MS intentionally crippling HTML if their servers sniffed Opera headers.

Edit: Google employees here, -please remind your bosses and colleagues what happened last someone abused their position to dominate the browser market.

> please remind your bosses and colleagues what happened last someone abused their position to dominate the browser market.

They got rich(er) and crippled competition for years to come?

Well they also got a fine so big [0] that they changed their ways somewhat[1] and still make money.

But then again, I know nothing. This is just a feeling I have.

[0]: Yes, and I think they also got the message loud and clear that this would just be a start unless they started behaving

[1]: not saying they are saints yet, but as a nix user out in the trenches I very much prefer the current Microsoft.

Yes, I had webview in mind when I was writing that comment. But obviously WebViews aren't good enough. We're talking about enough functionality to own a multi-window app.

Edit: What I more specifically had in mind was Firefox Prism, from circa 2007. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Prism

Why this stuff didn't take / isn't more popular now, I don't really know.

With the exception of IE/EDGE, all major browsers use an open source rendering engine.

It’s a lot easier to argue that a web browser is an essencial part of an OS this way.

Except Electron won't do it using their market share to take out Netscape.

No. That’s Chrome’s doing to Firefox.

Big difference, sure.

> A native notification bar icon, shortcuts in the menus/app launchers

This already works out of the box. "More tools -> Create shortcut..." in Chrome will create a launcher in the Gnome menu that will open Slack in its own window without a location bar.

> the app not exiting if i need to restart the browser, the app not being affected by extensions I install (adblockers, etc).

I want to be able to modify web apps, and I want to restart all webapps when I receive a security update for Chrome.

I don't think the advantages outweigh the risks for most Electron apps that also have webapps.

> > the app not exiting if i need to restart the browser, the app not being affected by extensions I install (adblockers, etc). > > I want to be able to modify web apps, and I want to restart all webapps when I receive a security update for Chrome.

You guys are sort of talking past each other here --- you both have something different that you want, and since Slack runs in both a standalone Electron shell and in the browser, it's giving you both what you asked for.

Why dismiss the things he likes in a standalone app as not addressing your needs for an in-browser webapp?

I'm saying that the webapp also gives him what he wants but without some serious disadvantages. If you really don't want to run any extensions on Slack, you can do that too: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/extension-automati...

We could have it all.

A shared runtime, with shared security updates, and applications being spawned as "standalone", with a cmdline parameter like --master-config that would let me enable Inspector and any specified addons. Because I agree, being able to freely modify third party software is huge.

chrome --app="https://www.google.com"

Gives you all of that, shame it's not better known.

Yeah I mean, Chrome tried to do it with Chrome Apps. It's older than Chrome, too. Firefox did it back in the days using a technology called "Prism": https://wiki.mozilla.org/Prism

It just.. it's not taking. It's not a valid way, right now, of telling people "Here's your native electron-like app". Why? It's hard to tell where the limits are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com