Comment by the_other | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_other | Hacker News Reader

On the face of it, this sounds great! I hope it leads to bold new things.

It also produces an interesting coherence:

Google + MS -> Blink

Apple -> Webkit

Linux -> Servo

All the main OSs now have their own web rendering engine.

The 00s saw anti-trust against MS for this practice (ok, for the rigid way MS forced their engine onto their users)... but today the market has coalesced around the same core idea, cementing the notion that general purpose OSs need a web rendering engine.

Might this pave the way for a better cross-platform UI development? Rather than shipping Electron to every device for every app, apps might leverage the web renderer tied to the OS?

I'm just wondering out loud. I was actually hoping we'd collectively move back towards native apps with better cross-platform tools, rather than integrating web apps deeper into OSs (even tho' I'm a web developer by trade and stand to gain from this).

The Linux Foundation is basically a catch-all foundation for smaller open source projects, this is not "Linux owns a browser engine".

The "Linux" there is more of an indicator of its origins than its purpose.

Thanks for the clarification.

Despite the name the Linux kernel is only one of many projects hosted by the Linux Foundation these days. Browser engine to operating system relationships haven’t changed with this move.

So feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong.

I thought the biggest draw to Electron was that it was a single stable platform that worked and looked the same everywhere.

I feel like (based on that) any attempts to move to OS bundled web engines would completely miss the point of why Electron is popular.

I think the biggest advantage of Electron is that you can write one code and it will run on all major desktop platforms AND web. There isn't really any other good solution for this.

> I feel like (based on that) any attempts to move to OS bundled web engines would completely miss the point of why Electron is popular.

If the web platform is modern enough (chrome, firefox and mayybe safari) then supporting these different platforms is not that difficult.

Not difficult no.

But certainly not anywhere close to the 0 extra effort required by an app developer to support other platforms with Electron as it currently is.

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