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Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

There should be a list of Electron alternatives somewhere. This looks like a promising start, at least.

This lead me to think that there are huge amount of legacy HTML functionality that Electron could potentially drop if it was possible. Electron doesn't really need to care about breaking the web. So there's definitely room for alternatives.

A strict subset, chosen for the greatest intersection of flexibility for developers, simplicity and performance with good documentation on how to write directly for it might go over well.

The hardest part for maintainers would be saying no when everyone inevitably asks to expand the feature-set.

If we choose a year as a checkpoint to start deprecating old web technology without sacrificing functionality, which one would be the reasonable pick?

There probably is a lot of legacy stuff in there but I suspect that most of it is deeply integrated into the needed functionality.

That said, I suspect that many of the more modern JS APIs which are organised as separate modules are much easier to exclude when building something like Electron. I'm talking about these kinds of APIs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API

Many APIs there to exposed things from deep inside the rendering engine, but there are still plenty left which are likely separate, like Bluetooth, Gamepad, Ambient Light, Beacon, IndexedDB, Image Capture, Geolocation, Payment request, Web Audio, etc.

Builds of Electron with exotic APIs removed could be good although I'm sceptical of whether that would bring the run-time memory use down much, i.e. what (API) you don't use, didn't hurt you anyway.

https://quark.sciter.com/

Is there an Electron alternative that uses the OS's rendering engine (Webkit on macOS, Edge on Windows), for developers who think that bundling a whole browser with their app is not the right tradeoff?

https://github.com/webview/webview

Check out: nodegui (https://github.com/nodegui/nodegui), electrino (https://github.com/pojala/electrino) or muban (https://github.com/yue/muban).

I've found two that are promising. wails [1] for Go and pywebview [2] for Python. Oddly enough, I haven't found a decent node package that is maintained and documented.

[1] https://wails.app [2] https://pywebview.flowrl.com/

They are called native WebWidgets and exist since KHTML and MSHTML were created in the mid-90's.

Anything else is just the laziness of not caring about Web standards and shipping an whole browser instead.

Every day ChromeOS is one step closer to overtaking all desktops.

Here is a list of lightweight alternatives for Electron: electrino, neutralino, Quark, Ultralight, Miniblink, Deskgap, WebWindow, litehtml, cztomsik/graffiti, yue, nodegui.

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