> We are working with the new Microsoft Edge browser to take advantage of the Hosted App Model for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) – converting the web app manifest into an app manifest, package the additional web content into an MSIX package and register it. In this model, a PWA is its own independent app registered to the system even though it is being hosted by Edge.
Can a shared, system-wide Electron runtime be far behind?
Even their flagship app, teams, is running its own copy at the moment.
If it wasn’t obvious: I anal.
MS had a similar technology over a decade before Electron existed:
If I check the dozens of Chrome processes on my machine, the largest part of their working sets is private, which is evidence against significant memory sharing.
It seems reasonable to only run the security sensitive parts in a dedicated process per origin and run other tasks in a central process for all web pages.
From what I understand, Chrome's processes communicate a lot via message-passing. You probably don't need large amounts of shared memory for that.
The largest part being private doesn't mean saving 10-20mb per process is insignificant. With a few electron apps open I'm easily losing a few hundred megs to electron overhead and many machines don't have that much RAM, especially laptops.
Each electron app also needs its own copy of centralized services like the i/o process, where a single chrome instance can share that across all tabs. An OS-level PWA implementation could share it across all PWAs and electron apps too.
It is genuinely difficult to spot that it’s actually “just” a website.
When you lock windows while it’s playing it shows up with media details like album art, play/pause etc.
It is additionally “registered” in the start menu, and correct icons and windows taskbar behaviour is used, making it virtually indistinguishable from a native app.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%22Org_charts%22_com...
:)
I remember some people on HN already predicting exactly this back when the announcement to base Edge on Chrome was made.
This is exactly what I was thinking about.
Electron is a similar ideal, but not on the OS level. They are just recreating the best aspects of IE for Chromium, and we will be better for it.
* noticeable for that era