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The most interesting part to me: > We are working with the new Microsoft Edge browser to take advantage of the Hosted App Model for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)
by qzw 7y ago
The most interesting part to me:
> We are working with the new Microsoft Edge browser to take advantage of the Hosted App Model for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) – converting the web app manifest into an app manifest, package the additional web content into an MSIX package and register it. In this model, a PWA is its own independent app registered to the system even though it is being hosted by Edge.
Can a shared, system-wide Electron runtime be far behind?
- eightysixfour 7y ago> Can a shared, system-wide Electron runtime be far behind? This is exactly what I was thinking about.
- catblast 7y agoMaybe whoosh...but.. Congratulations you’ve invented a web browser.
- drannex 7y agoThis was a major feature in IE9-11, that you could run basically a UI-less modifiable web application without noticing* that it's running on an embedded browser. Electron is a similar ideal, but not on the OS level. They are just recreating the best aspects of IE for Chromium, and we will be better for it. * noticeable for that era
- basch 7y agoThats probably why they switched Edge to chromium. Instead of each electron app running its own copy of node and chrome, those components can be build into the os, which is much better for battery life. Even their flagship app, teams, is running its own copy at the moment.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoThey got in trouble for embedding IE4 into Windows and supposedly eliminating user "choice". Now nobody will care if they do it again.
- verbify 7y agoChromium is open source, so there's no chance they can be called a monopoly.
- mcny 7y agoMy understanding is that monopoly by itself is not illegal but it is the abuse of one’s market position in one thing to gain advantage in another. Not saying this is correct, just, or legal, just saying that’s what I think is how things are at least in the US. If it wasn’t obvious: I anal.
- xg15 7y agoWhat does open source have to do with choice?
- hurricanetc 7y agoAs has always been the case, you can use whatever browser you want on whatever OS you want. This has never been more true than right now.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jdc 7y agoI don't think using the open-core model gets them off the hook.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dakna 7y agoGiven the efforts behind https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blazor https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blazor I would say it is the WebAssembly based .NET runtime that counts in the long run.
- dahauns 7y agoGiven the track record of Microsoft I'd say: That mainly depends on which team "wins". https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%22Org_charts%22_comic_by_Manu_Cornet.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%22Org_charts%22_com... :)
- saagarjha 7y agoHow is this different from the browser?
- k__ 7y agoIt cloud have more permissions.
- Systemic33 7y agoI can recommend trying this out with the Spotify web app. It is genuinely difficult to spot that it’s actually “just” a website. When you lock windows while it’s playing it shows up with media details like album art, play/pause etc. It is additionally “registered” in the start menu, and correct icons and windows taskbar behaviour is used, making it virtually indistinguishable from a native app.
- NikolaeVarius 7y agoIts a terrible app though
- hizanberg 7y agoCompared to what? What’s the best Desktop media player?
- dmitrygr 7y agoWinAmp
- jgalentine007 7y agoIt really whips the llama's ass!
- 7leafer 7y agofoobar2000 + media player classic HC
- FpUser 7y agoexactly what I use as well
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ComputerGuru 7y ago
- PhilippGille 7y ago> Can a shared, system-wide Electron runtime be far behind? I remember some people on HN already predicting exactly this back when the announcement to base Edge on Chrome was made.
- edko 7y agoMicrosoft has already updated Window's native web-view to Edge, from IE. There are already some projects that take advantage of this and enable multi-platform app creation, with executables much lighter than Electron. A good example is https://github.com/zserge/webview https://github.com/zserge/webview. I have tried its Rust binding, and it works very nicely.
- CodesInChaos 7y agoHow is a shared runtime much lighter than electron? While you can share some memory, I doubt it's most of it. If I check the dozens of Chrome processes on my machine, the largest part of their working sets is private, which is evidence against significant memory sharing.
- m0dest 7y agoOne aspect of "lightness" is transfer & disk: initial download duration, storage size per app (often over 100 MB for apps with embedded Chromium), and the size of each app update which often needs to update the embedded Chromium too, if they're being responsible. There is no "LTS" version of Chromium.
- xg15 7y agoI don't know much about Chrome's architecture, but are you sure each tab/window/origin has a separate set of all processes? It seems reasonable to only run the security sensitive parts in a dedicated process per origin and run other tasks in a central process for all web pages. From what I understand, Chrome's processes communicate a lot via message-passing. You probably don't need large amounts of shared memory for that.
- kevingadd 7y agoThe weight of a bunch of DLLs, type information etc for chromium is actually pretty sizable. An electron app spins up 6 processes on average last time I checked, more sometimes. The v8 team has had to invest a lot into reducing bloat from per-process duplication of data and also found ways to minimize startup time. The largest part being private doesn't mean saving 10-20mb per process is insignificant. With a few electron apps open I'm easily losing a few hundred megs to electron overhead and many machines don't have that much RAM, especially laptops. Each electron app also needs its own copy of centralized services like the i/o process, where a single chrome instance can share that across all tabs. An OS-level PWA implementation could share it across all PWAs and electron apps too.
- userbinator 7y agoCan a shared, system-wide Electron runtime be far behind? MS had a similar technology over a decade before Electron existed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application
- mycall 7y agoHTA still exists. For new apps? No thank you.
- notRobot 7y agoIndeed. HTA showed a lot of promise before MS deliberately crippled it in fear of "web technologies" overtaking desktop apps. A very interesting read: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
- enos_feedler 7y agoAnd a shared, system-wide Android runtime. This sounds like a great path towards continuity across the Surface product line from desktop to mobile, given the mobile Surface devices being powered by Android coming this year.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- untog 7y agoThat’s essentially what progressive web apps are once they’re installed. They use all the resources of the browser so they only take up as much disk space as their HTML/CSS/JS.
- _bxg1 7y agoWas just about to post this same quote. Really exciting stuff.