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Please, please stop comparing built in platform webviews and alternatives like Sciter to Electron. You can hate on Electron all you want (I do too) but it's a

Please, please stop comparing built in platform webviews and alternatives like Sciter to Electron. You can hate on Electron all you want (I do too) but it's a totally different beast to almost all these other solutions. It's all fun and games until you realize that to get half the junk Electron throws you for free, you'll wind up building it yourself in these solutions.

csande17 6y ago
Arguments like these are a lot more compelling when they include some specific features that are missing. Too often, "includes everything you need for free!" translates to "weighs down your binary with a hundred megabytes of functionality no one actually uses."
- Klonoar 6y ago
  The argument has been beaten to death by every thread on the topic here, so I don't particularly feel the need to take the bait. Your comment also implies that I'm cosigning Electron being a bloated slug of an environment; I'm not. You will never unseat it by offering a pale imitation of it in place of it, though - and these comparisons result in little more than that.
- sbergot 6y ago
  What electronjs brings is cross platform deployment. This is not a small feature.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- jancsika 6y ago
  * PointerEvent for handling mouse, touch, multi-touch all with a single API * decodeURIComponent and unescape because my backend sometimes sends ISO-8859-1 cruft and I don't want things to break because of those stupid edge cases * web animations animate method isn't necessary but boy is it nice for a quick-and-dirty solution * those insufferable "NS"-suffixed DOM methods because yes, I do need to create SVG elements programmatically now and then The list goes on and on, running the gamut from "convenient kludge" to "the GUI might not work correctly without this." The idea of the GUI developer putting up with more obstacles in their quest for a slick-looking UI because they'd like to leverage a slick-looking GUI-toolkit has got to be an anti-pattern.
edko 6y ago
It depends on the application. I did a couple of projects with Rust's web-view crate (which uses native Safari on MacOS, and native Edge on Windows). This gave me access to the full JS and the full Rust ecosystem. I think the possibilities were richer than if I had used Electron alone. For example, I was able to use the Tantivy crate, for very fast and powerful full-text search. All of this with a fraction of the executable size.
- Klonoar 6y ago
  I mean, no: you can do the same stuff with Electron, and you _won't_ be saddled with the issues inherent to WKWebView that Apple still hasn't fixed years later. There are also web features that Safari notoriously does not implement that you'd have access to in Edge. Webview2 on Windows is also going through a weird period where you can't rely on it "just working" without the end user installing a runtime. There is a thread, long ago here on HN, where the developer who made the Slack transition from native webviews per platform (which it was, originally, and everyone conveniently forgets) to Electron. He notes it was specifically because cross-platform issues become a pain in the ass to deal with, and Electron avoids that. There's a disconnect between the average HN commentator who builds a UI in HTML/CSS/JS, and the types of frontends that larger applications build in those languages. Cross platform stuff shows up, and it's not a great use of time when there's one runtime sitting there that does everything and looks the same everywhere.
  - jeremyjh 6y ago
    I don't know why you are being downvoted. Personally I consider Electron to be cancer but this comment is very informative and raises some very valid points. For some reason it is 2020 and there is no fully qualified solution for cross platform desktop application development. Every option has massive downsides, gotchas, rough edges and limitations.
    - Klonoar 6y ago
      Meh, it's downvotes due to blind Electron hate. I'm not too surprised nor bothered by it.
syspec 6y ago
It has its own HTML rendering engine

csande17 6y ago

Arguments like these are a lot more compelling when they include some specific features that are missing. Too often, "includes everything you need for free!" translates to "weighs down your binary with a hundred megabytes of functionality no one actually uses."

Klonoar 6y ago
The argument has been beaten to death by every thread on the topic here, so I don't particularly feel the need to take the bait. Your comment also implies that I'm cosigning Electron being a bloated slug of an environment; I'm not. You will never unseat it by offering a pale imitation of it in place of it, though - and these comparisons result in little more than that.
sbergot 6y ago
What electronjs brings is cross platform deployment. This is not a small feature.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
jancsika 6y ago
* PointerEvent for handling mouse, touch, multi-touch all with a single API * decodeURIComponent and unescape because my backend sometimes sends ISO-8859-1 cruft and I don't want things to break because of those stupid edge cases * web animations animate method isn't necessary but boy is it nice for a quick-and-dirty solution * those insufferable "NS"-suffixed DOM methods because yes, I do need to create SVG elements programmatically now and then The list goes on and on, running the gamut from "convenient kludge" to "the GUI might not work correctly without this." The idea of the GUI developer putting up with more obstacles in their quest for a slick-looking UI because they'd like to leverage a slick-looking GUI-toolkit has got to be an anti-pattern.

edko 6y ago

It depends on the application. I did a couple of projects with Rust's web-view crate (which uses native Safari on MacOS, and native Edge on Windows). This gave me access to the full JS and the full Rust ecosystem. I think the possibilities were richer than if I had used Electron alone. For example, I was able to use the Tantivy crate, for very fast and powerful full-text search. All of this with a fraction of the executable size.

Klonoar 6y ago
I mean, no: you can do the same stuff with Electron, and you _won't_ be saddled with the issues inherent to WKWebView that Apple still hasn't fixed years later. There are also web features that Safari notoriously does not implement that you'd have access to in Edge. Webview2 on Windows is also going through a weird period where you can't rely on it "just working" without the end user installing a runtime. There is a thread, long ago here on HN, where the developer who made the Slack transition from native webviews per platform (which it was, originally, and everyone conveniently forgets) to Electron. He notes it was specifically because cross-platform issues become a pain in the ass to deal with, and Electron avoids that. There's a disconnect between the average HN commentator who builds a UI in HTML/CSS/JS, and the types of frontends that larger applications build in those languages. Cross platform stuff shows up, and it's not a great use of time when there's one runtime sitting there that does everything and looks the same everywhere.
- jeremyjh 6y ago
  I don't know why you are being downvoted. Personally I consider Electron to be cancer but this comment is very informative and raises some very valid points. For some reason it is 2020 and there is no fully qualified solution for cross platform desktop application development. Every option has massive downsides, gotchas, rough edges and limitations.
  - Klonoar 6y ago
    Meh, it's downvotes due to blind Electron hate. I'm not too surprised nor bothered by it.

syspec 6y ago

It has its own HTML rendering engine