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I'm curious. If you have 20 electron apps running, does that mean you would have 20 copies of the completely same thing wasting your disk space and RAM? How wo

I'm curious. If you have 20 electron apps running, does that mean you would have 20 copies of the completely same thing wasting your disk space and RAM? How would that work if all the application developers decided that native sucks and all should use Electron?

Zekio 9y ago
20 electron apps would be 20 copies of mostly the same browser
pavlov 9y ago
Yes, that's essentially what happens. And it's a huge waste if you have 20 Electron apps running. Each ships with its own copy of Chromium which is as large as an operating system. I created a proof-of-concept called Electrino that uses the platform native libraries to cut down on app size: https://medium.com/dailyjs/put-your-electron-app-on-a-diet-with-electrino-c7ffdf1d6297 https://medium.com/dailyjs/put-your-electron-app-on-a-diet-w... Unfortunately I haven't had the time to work on Electrino due to family, etc. — I wish I did because the need is clearly there.
- ChristianBundy 9y ago
  Hey, I saw the post that got the ball rolling on Electrino and I've been meaning to reach out to you. Do you have any tips on where to start on porting Electrino to Linux? Electron-like "web" apps (that follow W3C standards) seem to be the future, and I'd love to help out however I can.
  - pavlov 9y ago
    Great! I use desktop Linux regularly and I have some ideas where the Linux port could start off. Would you drop me an email at pauli@lacquer.fi and let’s talk?
- tambourine_man 9y ago
  I've been thinking of something along those lines for years. I hope your project gets traction. I'd love to develop with web technologies exclusively, but what we've been doing with Electron is crazy. Imagine loading a whole new Win32 or Carbon/Cocoa for every app you open. I can understand the inconsistencies and lack of feature support that could emerge from using a different browser engine for each OS (Webkit/Edge), but there should at least be away for Electron apps to share Chromium/Node runtimes between them.
  - satysin 9y ago
    Isn't this basically what PWAs will hopefully solve? Rather than Spotify, Slack, Discord, ... all coming with their own Electron bundle they can be packaged up as a PWA and use the browser as the runtime environment along with all the nice offline stuff, safe OS integration for notifications, sandboxed file system access, ability to still do some work in S0i3 (aka Modern Standy on Windows), etc. Or am I totally wrong about this? I am not a web developer so I could be :) Bonus question: how would this work for things like Atom and VS Code that are electron based. Could they become a PWA?
    - tambourine_man 9y ago
      All good questions and some things will probably be well addressed by PWA or whatever we decide to call JavaScript rich webpages by then. But some UI issues, like the lack of a proper menu, browser's chrome and address bar will still be a turn off. Besides, having unrestriced access to the user's drive is not something a web page should be able to do and is a must for something like a text editor.
      - davidjnelson 9y ago
        There is BrowserFS https://github.com/jvilk/BrowserFS https://github.com/jvilk/BrowserFS
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
        There's no reason a text editor, or most applications really, need unrestricted access to a user's disk. They have to prompt the user with a file open dialog anyway, so you may as well let the OS handle that and pass an fd/handle across the boundary for you.
- tbrock 9y ago
  Why wouldn’t google just ship a “libchrome” shared library so that they could share it?
  - saagarjha 9y ago
    They do, it's called Google Chrome.
  - tracker1 9y ago
    Because google is more inclined to break their own APIs without concern of the integrations of others. Adobe AIR was an effort to create a common runtime for similar things... wouldn't mind seeing a few OS vendors coming together to support something similar, but on the flip side, I don't want to be stuck with Node 4.0's API in 2024.
paulie_a 9y ago
You also have 20 security nightmare apps running

Zekio 9y ago

20 electron apps would be 20 copies of mostly the same browser

pavlov 9y ago

Yes, that's essentially what happens. And it's a huge waste if you have 20 Electron apps running. Each ships with its own copy of Chromium which is as large as an operating system. I created a proof-of-concept called Electrino that uses the platform native libraries to cut down on app size: https://medium.com/dailyjs/put-your-electron-app-on-a-diet-with-electrino-c7ffdf1d6297 https://medium.com/dailyjs/put-your-electron-app-on-a-diet-w... Unfortunately I haven't had the time to work on Electrino due to family, etc. — I wish I did because the need is clearly there.

ChristianBundy 9y ago
Hey, I saw the post that got the ball rolling on Electrino and I've been meaning to reach out to you. Do you have any tips on where to start on porting Electrino to Linux? Electron-like "web" apps (that follow W3C standards) seem to be the future, and I'd love to help out however I can.
- pavlov 9y ago
  Great! I use desktop Linux regularly and I have some ideas where the Linux port could start off. Would you drop me an email at pauli@lacquer.fi and let’s talk?
tambourine_man 9y ago
I've been thinking of something along those lines for years. I hope your project gets traction. I'd love to develop with web technologies exclusively, but what we've been doing with Electron is crazy. Imagine loading a whole new Win32 or Carbon/Cocoa for every app you open. I can understand the inconsistencies and lack of feature support that could emerge from using a different browser engine for each OS (Webkit/Edge), but there should at least be away for Electron apps to share Chromium/Node runtimes between them.
- satysin 9y ago
  Isn't this basically what PWAs will hopefully solve? Rather than Spotify, Slack, Discord, ... all coming with their own Electron bundle they can be packaged up as a PWA and use the browser as the runtime environment along with all the nice offline stuff, safe OS integration for notifications, sandboxed file system access, ability to still do some work in S0i3 (aka Modern Standy on Windows), etc. Or am I totally wrong about this? I am not a web developer so I could be :) Bonus question: how would this work for things like Atom and VS Code that are electron based. Could they become a PWA?
  - tambourine_man 9y ago
    All good questions and some things will probably be well addressed by PWA or whatever we decide to call JavaScript rich webpages by then. But some UI issues, like the lack of a proper menu, browser's chrome and address bar will still be a turn off. Besides, having unrestriced access to the user's drive is not something a web page should be able to do and is a must for something like a text editor.
    - davidjnelson 9y ago
      There is BrowserFS https://github.com/jvilk/BrowserFS https://github.com/jvilk/BrowserFS
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
      There's no reason a text editor, or most applications really, need unrestricted access to a user's disk. They have to prompt the user with a file open dialog anyway, so you may as well let the OS handle that and pass an fd/handle across the boundary for you.
tbrock 9y ago
Why wouldn’t google just ship a “libchrome” shared library so that they could share it?
- saagarjha 9y ago
  They do, it's called Google Chrome.
- tracker1 9y ago
  Because google is more inclined to break their own APIs without concern of the integrations of others. Adobe AIR was an effort to create a common runtime for similar things... wouldn't mind seeing a few OS vendors coming together to support something similar, but on the flip side, I don't want to be stuck with Node 4.0's API in 2024.

paulie_a 9y ago

You also have 20 security nightmare apps running