4 ms·

What's the benefit of using this instead of Electron? Genuinely curious about the benefit. Is Gecko better than Chromium in certain cases?

ZenoArrow 9y ago
> "Is Gecko better than Chromium in certain cases?" Yes, in certain cases. However, I don't think it's worth another flame war about this. Even if I posted some benchmarks all you'd have is a stream of people sharing their anecdata trying to confirm or deny the accuracy of the benchmarks. Can we nip this in the bud before it begins and just be glad that Electron has some competition to help push it forward?
- kitsunesoba 9y ago
  Agreed. I'm not a fan of web apps/wrappers in general, but they're here and they're clearly not going away any time soon, so it's important that they don't become steeped in a Blink-based monoculture. Competition is healthy.
  - roryisok 9y ago
    my thoughts exactly. mozilla arguably set the ball rolling on this stuff with the Prism project, which allowed turning web-pages into chromeless browser window apps, with their own desktop icons and everything
roryisok 9y ago
One difference (Don't know if its a benefit) is that it uses a common runtime. Two qbrt apps would use the same installed version of Firefox Nightly, so app download sizes would be smaller. If you read these electron threads this is something that comes up a lot. Firefox's latest build made significant RAM usage improvements [1], leapfrogging Chrome when it came to multiple tabs. [1][http://www.techradar.com/news/firefoxs-blazing-speed-with-huge-numbers-of-tabs-leaves-chrome-in-the-dust http://www.techradar.com/news/firefoxs-blazing-speed-with-hu...]
- jancsika 9y ago
  If I package up my app and ship for Windows, and you package up your app and ship for Windows, how do the two apps use a common runtime?
  - rtpg 9y ago
    the same way that the JVM works, at least in theory. You have the base virtual machine installed, and then the app just needs to ship the code itself. You could even ship with an "install script header", like "if this isn't installed, offer to download and install it". I imagine a lot of us have seen these kinds of installers before.
    - jancsika 9y ago
      I don't understand how that would be different than Electron or nw.js. For example, if there were a Debian package for either of those, all apps leveraging them would just declare that same package a dependency and you'd have a single system-wide install for the large binary everyone keeps complaining about. (AFAICT there is no such deb package for any of the above.)
      - Crespyl 9y ago
        Electron is designed to be bundled into your app, I'm not aware of any distros/package tools that allow Electron apps to share a runtime. The JVM (and apparently qbrt) is designed to be shared, apps are expected to use the installed system version of the VM, though if the packager wants they can include a specific version to use. I wish it were easy/possible to get Electron apps to share things, it bothers me that Chrome, Discord, and Slack almost certainly could share most of their hundreds of megabytes.
        jancsika 9y ago
        It appears both electron and nw.js can be installed through npm (though the electron one is more up-to-date than the nw.js one: https://www.npmjs.com/package/nwjs https://www.npmjs.com/package/nwjs and electron: https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-prebuilt https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-prebuilt
imtringued 9y ago
In theory the app could actually be cross platform for every platform that supports nodejs and gecko instead of being only cross platform for the platforms that the developer wants to support. You'd have a generic build where native libraries are compiled with webassembly and then specialised builds for each supported platform for more performance.
- roryisok 9y ago
  Good point. If you don't have to build for architecture it could run anywhere

ZenoArrow 9y ago

> "Is Gecko better than Chromium in certain cases?" Yes, in certain cases. However, I don't think it's worth another flame war about this. Even if I posted some benchmarks all you'd have is a stream of people sharing their anecdata trying to confirm or deny the accuracy of the benchmarks. Can we nip this in the bud before it begins and just be glad that Electron has some competition to help push it forward?

kitsunesoba 9y ago
Agreed. I'm not a fan of web apps/wrappers in general, but they're here and they're clearly not going away any time soon, so it's important that they don't become steeped in a Blink-based monoculture. Competition is healthy.
- roryisok 9y ago
  my thoughts exactly. mozilla arguably set the ball rolling on this stuff with the Prism project, which allowed turning web-pages into chromeless browser window apps, with their own desktop icons and everything

roryisok 9y ago

One difference (Don't know if its a benefit) is that it uses a common runtime. Two qbrt apps would use the same installed version of Firefox Nightly, so app download sizes would be smaller. If you read these electron threads this is something that comes up a lot. Firefox's latest build made significant RAM usage improvements [1], leapfrogging Chrome when it came to multiple tabs. [1][http://www.techradar.com/news/firefoxs-blazing-speed-with-huge-numbers-of-tabs-leaves-chrome-in-the-dust http://www.techradar.com/news/firefoxs-blazing-speed-with-hu...]

jancsika 9y ago
If I package up my app and ship for Windows, and you package up your app and ship for Windows, how do the two apps use a common runtime?
- rtpg 9y ago
  the same way that the JVM works, at least in theory. You have the base virtual machine installed, and then the app just needs to ship the code itself. You could even ship with an "install script header", like "if this isn't installed, offer to download and install it". I imagine a lot of us have seen these kinds of installers before.
  - jancsika 9y ago
    I don't understand how that would be different than Electron or nw.js. For example, if there were a Debian package for either of those, all apps leveraging them would just declare that same package a dependency and you'd have a single system-wide install for the large binary everyone keeps complaining about. (AFAICT there is no such deb package for any of the above.)
    - Crespyl 9y ago
      Electron is designed to be bundled into your app, I'm not aware of any distros/package tools that allow Electron apps to share a runtime. The JVM (and apparently qbrt) is designed to be shared, apps are expected to use the installed system version of the VM, though if the packager wants they can include a specific version to use. I wish it were easy/possible to get Electron apps to share things, it bothers me that Chrome, Discord, and Slack almost certainly could share most of their hundreds of megabytes.
      - jancsika 9y ago
        It appears both electron and nw.js can be installed through npm (though the electron one is more up-to-date than the nw.js one: https://www.npmjs.com/package/nwjs https://www.npmjs.com/package/nwjs and electron: https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-prebuilt https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-prebuilt

imtringued 9y ago

In theory the app could actually be cross platform for every platform that supports nodejs and gecko instead of being only cross platform for the platforms that the developer wants to support. You'd have a generic build where native libraries are compiled with webassembly and then specialised builds for each supported platform for more performance.

roryisok 9y ago
Good point. If you don't have to build for architecture it could run anywhere