Comment by tfsh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tfsh | Hacker News Reader

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Forking perfectly functional browser-based web app into Electron apps is an irritating trend with very limited benefits. Some apps exist as Electron apps because they require native OS access, this app does not, therefore there is no reason to do so.

Porting to Electron would be trivial but in doing so you incur the following ramifications:

- the user has yet another instance of Chromium running on their device.

- they can't interact with browser based UIs easily any longer (bookmarking, retaining in history, copying the URL, different cookie/login jars, etc...).

- might fragment the users workflow even more if they have to interleave between electron apps and their browser

- lack of user extensions and some important accessibility features

In Chrome you can create a shortcut for the page and select "open in a new window" which by-in-large emulates the workflow you request. I'm sure there's a similar process for Firefox.

Interestingly enough, when I want the compartmentalization experience that comes from an “App” on macOS, I turn to… Microsoft Edge. Edge has a nifty little feature that lets you “Appify” a website. I mostly find this useful for company-required PWAs, and most-of-all, Microsoft Teams. The Edge-“Appified” MS Teams on macOS is leaps and bounds more performant than the “Native” (Electron) MS Teams apps on macOS (consumes ~25MB of mem vs ~800MB). Has the nice benefit of your “Apps” being a Command-Space away.

edit: clarify & format

Didn't know that about Edge, thanks!

For other browsers (incl Edge) Fluid does the same for me (http://fluidapp.com (not affiliated))

After opening a few emails: Outlook MacOs app: 922 MB Outlook PWA via Fluid: 42 MB

Another benefit of this is that my ad-blocker still works with these apps and that you can always fall back to default browser behaviour like opening a link in a new tab.

I think at least forking and hosting it yourself if a good middle ground between forking into an Electron app.

Who wants a tool they rely on to one day update with spyware, HTTP 404, or filled with ads (like Toptal did with keycode.info)?

Browsers should make it easier to interact with the command line then. I want to be able to run a command and it opens the result in a browser tab.

Every browser I've used supports passing a URL as an argument, and that URL is then opened.

There’s probably some limit on that. JSON files are commonly 10s of MBs.

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