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Comment by camhenlin | Hacker News Reader

I am kind of disappointed in the naming of this. There's another project named Node-WebKit: https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/tree/master It allows you to build a native app using node and webkit.

Reading the name of this project got my hopes up, thinking I was going to have the option of using Firefox instead of Webkit as my rendering engine. Oh well.

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That would be node-gecko (if it existed), wouldn't it? But yes, it's a bit misleading, by node-firefox I was expecting the full blown browser written in javascript myself.

Or some thing like node-js but using SpiderMonkey instead of V8. Name really does not fit and blows up expectations. node-firefox-simulator would be more apt.

https://github.com/zpao/spidernode

No longer maintained, sadly.

>That would be node-gecko (if it existed), wouldn't it?

Only if it followed exactly the same naming logic down to a t.

But it didn't have to, node-firefox would also be a perfectly apt name for something like node-webkit based on gecko too -- and not suitable at all for what it actually is now.

It's worth pointing out that Node-WebKit got renamed recently to NW.js (as it's now based on io.js and Chromium).

You are right though, I also expected to see a similar project to NW.js but coming from Mozilla. Another shot at packaging offline web apps would have been interesting, especially since I don't know of good alternatives to NW.js.

As things stand, it's difficult to get excited about anything FirefoxOS since it has such a small number of users.

A bit off topic, but how easy is it to set up NW.js to just go looking for a index.html in a specific location? Say sitting next to an exe in windows in the the app folder in OSX.

I was thinking I'd like to try and get my web app in Steam but don't really want to mess around with building Chromium ect ect.

Edit: just read this and I think it answered my questions. http://strongloop.com/strongblog/creating-desktop-applicatio...

Couldn't agree more. I got butterflies when thinking about node-webkit with gecko instead of webkit, but reading through the post just made me really disappointed.

The reason I really want something like node-firefox is the build process for firefox is so much easier than webkit, and if I make a desktop app that I want people to be able to build from source node-webkit is such a huge beast to compile. I'm basically stuck with the binary versions, which is not the way to go for software that does crypto.

Does anyone know how hard it would be to make a real node-firefox (as in, FF version of node-webkit)? Why is chrome the go-to for all the web-app-as-desktop-app frameworks?

In the case of node-webkit they give you access to both the Web platform and node APIs. That's possible because both projects use V8, so with a bit of twisting they can be relatively easily integrated into one. (Incidentally, this is why they're using io.js, the outdated V8 version in node made things more difficult)

If you wanted node-gecko you'd either need to fuse V8 to gecko or reimplement or create a wrapper around spidermonkey emulating the V8 API. That's a lot of work.

Is this part of a ridiculous trend where major software developers pick whatever name they want for their language, tool, library, what-have-you without caring if there are other projects with that name, if the name is confusing, if the name is too generic (and thus hard to do a web search for), etc.?

This might be some sort of bias on my part but I seem to see this more and more often. Programmers are known to be bad at naming but these days it seems they don't even try. How about just following a simple rule: pick a word that doesn't exist in the dictionary or on the web at all. Just make up a combination of letters. Please.

If they plan on doing that as well, it would be better to wait for the more secure and much higher performance Servo anyway. At which point they can just call it Node-Servo.

It's actually somewhat of a theme in the node community to prefix your project name with 'node-', e.g. [1]. In this case, however, Mozilla is still going against that custom by also prefixing the package name itself with 'node-', which is a bit redundant.

[1] https://github.com/node-gitlab/node-gitlab

Yeah I thought it was going to be a way to port NodeJS apps to run natively on FirefoxOS...

Still want something like that though.

I remember a while back Mozilla came out with Prism, which was basically Node-Webkit w/out the Node.

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