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Comment by rickcarlino | Hacker News Reader

Desktop operating systems should be able to run zipped web apps the way Electron apps run today. It ought to just be part of the OS.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application always been there waiting to be discovered

Adobe Air, for the obscure nostalgia bomb

I was going to mention Microsoft Active Desktop in the original comment, but I didn’t want HN to know how old I am.

Unzip it.

Double click the html file.

The OS will run the web app using a browser that is just part of the OS.

You have clearly never actually tried that.

I don't know about Windows, but on macOS you can. If you wanted to try yourself you could use SingleFile to export a webpage as a .html zip file which you could then just 'open' into the web browser.

For a web app, you might have to unzip it and launch the .html inside. CyberChef for example does offer a downloadable copy of its web app instructing you do just that.

[1]: https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/

I did it this week. MacOS, but it would have worked on Windows or Linux. Double click any HTML file in any of those and it will open in a browser

Will it work for every bloated react app? no.

Will it work if you intentionally put the slightest amount of thought into the design? yes.

It will work for documents and the most simple TODO apps. It actually will not work for anything useful. There are a number of security policies in place explicitly to prevent things in file:// from accessing features available over real HTTPS. You will not have access to anything that requires a network connection, local storage, location services, WebRTC, etc. This is why things like Electron exist and why experiments like Active Desktop, HTA, the thing linked to in this article, that other project that had the same name as this one, and Adobe AIR were tried.

CORS issues due to trying to a .json via file://.

CORS issues on a tainted canvas if you try to render an image from a file:// src.

And if there's a form or something with a backend? Just break?

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