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If only each OS would ship an abstraction layer that guaranteed "at least modern browser X" that one could ship into. I want to ship an electron app but I want it to be 100kb and start in 0.1s and take almost no memory because the libs are shared. I don't want each little chat app or music player to gobble up half a gig of ram and take 3 seconds to start.


I give it 15 minutes before decisions, well reasoned or otherwise, by the individual platforms cause incompatibility issues that make you wish you'd just shipped your own copy of Chrome in the first place. This is part of the reason Electron even exists.


Microsoft is working on an API that will use the chromium that's part of their new version of edge. It's already available for use (of course right now you have to have the edge beta downloaded): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/hosting/webv...


Thank you!!! I have been waiting for that shoe to drop. Since the OLE interfaces to IE are hopelessly out of date by decades.


Is this anything other than just a webview?


You just re-invented the PWA, basically. Only modern browsers support them (though you can't guarantee eveyrone has one), so you just package and ship a web site. Of course, browser tabs themselves can take a lot of memory; a fair number take 50 megs apiece, and some take 100, so don't bet on your site necessarily only taking a few kb.


Well I also need good native apis (files, hardware, OS integration, window management), and deployment scenarios like native apps.

But yes, like PWA but I want the app to run under the OS, not sandboxed in a browser.


I think OS makers explicitly don't want to do this. In the case of Apple, they prefer you to use all their tools and technologies. It allows them more management of the experience.


Using the word experience is why we're in this mess. These are tools we're talking about. Not an African safari.




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