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Comment by creshal | Hacker News Reader

Also heavily used in the industry are toolkits like sciter, which give you HTML/CSS UIs without an entire browser engine underneath. I suspect those will be eating the remaining market share for 'traditional' toolkits, simply because it's the dominant UI paradigm.

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The motivation behind using electron is:

a) being able to deploy same codebase on web and desktop

b) reusing the vast selection of libraries for web

c) tapping the large amount of trained developers.

Sciter fails on a) and b), because it doesn't support even such a basic and widely used feature as CSS flex (they have something similar, but incompatible).

Even c) is very debatable.

The path to hell is paved with good intentions

Regarding CSS and layout in general, there is a concept of sizers and spacers in wxWidgets that makes layout far easier to grok for the average dev. That being said, it does (sadly) add to code bloat which is where CSS excels, IMO.

I'm currently working on a Sciter-like solution that does support widely used CSS features such as Flexbox, CSS Grid, Media Queries, CSS Variables, etc. Although we're not planning to ship a JS engine: scripting will be with Rust that compiles to WASM when running on web.

Binary sizes are currently around ~12mb which isn't as good as Sciter but is quite a bit better than Electron.

> being able to deploy same codebase on web and desktop

Desktop UI and Web UI models are so different that in reality you cannot use the same codebase on 100% in both targets.

Web UI uses traditional Web's "endless tape" model where only width is known. This does not really work on desktop where width and height are finite. See this Sciter based app https://notes.sciter.com/ as an example.

> reusing the vast selection of libraries for web

If you do need this then you can use Sciter's WebView that is a <frame> backed by system browser:

https://sciter.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/sciter-webview...

If you set the height of your body element to 100vh (100dvh in the case of iPhones), then the web acts like the desktop in this regard. They’re different since the tooling is different but not because they’re essentially different.

> If you do need this then you can use Sciter's WebView that is a <frame> backed by system browser:

iframes are very constrained in what you can do, if you’re targeting the web from the start you get the full power of using those libraries beyond the bounds of a single frame.

> Desktop UI and Web UI models are so different that in reality you cannot use the same codebase on 100% in both targets.

I develop an Electron app and the CSS is 100% same on both web and desktop. It's not a "web page", it's an app, which doesn't use the "endless tape" model.

> If you do need this then you can use Sciter's WebView that is a <frame> backed by system browser:

At that point it seems easier to just use something like Tauri which uses the system browser for all rendering.

Thanks for that! That sounds very sane. I agree that dragging an entire browser engine just to have a desktop app is excessive -- less code is always better.

https://sciter.com/developers/engine-architecture/

While sciter seems nice, their

> In almost 10 years, Sciter UI engine has become the secret weapon of success for some of the most prominent antivirus products on the market: Norton Antivirus and Internet Security, Comodo Internet Security, ESET Antivirus, BitDefender Antivirus, and others. The use of HTML/CSS has allowed their UI to stay in touch with modern GUI trends throughout all these years, and will continue to well into the future.

Made me laugh a bit, I usually find antivirus softwares out of touch with good design and really impractical due to that.

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