5 ms·

They're common enough now that maybe we should just consider html, css, and js to be GUI scripting and markup languages in this context? Your browser is a deskt

by 55555 5y ago

They're common enough now that maybe we should just consider html, css, and js to be GUI scripting and markup languages in this context? Your browser is a desktop app and yet almost everything you do with it can only be done online. Perhaps it's fair to call this a Desktop app as it can be run offline, but not fair to call it a "native" desktop app.

ad404b8a372f2b9 5y ago
It's not a problem of semantics or naming purity, it's a practical issue of resource consumption and UI/UX.
- Zababa 5y ago
  It's a tradeoff from some resources to other resources. If you want a native app, you can invest time to make one or money to pay someone to make one. If you don't, you'll have to pay with more CPU/RAM/brain power usage.
pjmlp 5y ago
Small collection of Electron predecessors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL https://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/The_Wonderful_Widgetised_World_of_Web_Runtime.php https://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/The_Wonderful_... Eventually Electron will join them.
- wayneftw 5y ago
  Pffft. Okay. That's quite a reach you've got there! ...as if any of those were ever near the same caliber as Electron in just about any aspect of user or developer needs. > Eventually Electron will join them. Perhaps it will, eventually, but not until we have better native desktop kits that fill the needs that Electron is serving right now and if they don't let you build apps with the most popular programming language in the world (that'd be JavaScript) then you can just forget it about it.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    The good thing of being an old dog at this game is seeing technology of the same caliber as Electron, whatever that is supposed to mean, come and go every couple of years. So I just tolerate it, while the pendulum reaches its point of maximum displacement.
    - wayneftw 5y ago
      Yeah I've only been programming since around 1981. Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're not the only old timer around here. "Whatever that is supposed to mean", but you've still been seeing it? That makes no sense. None of those kits you listed have nearly the same robust quality of UX or DX as Electron. None of the technologies listed here even had a dependency manager (LOL). 3 of the kits weren't even cross platform! Tolerate it? By making off-topic complaints about it on every post about a desktop app built with Electron, in an attempt to deride the conversation about the actual subject? Without even have a suggestion for a decent alternative? Clearly there's some sort of disconnect with reality here.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Everyone is a dog on Internet, and yes I do tolerate and can't wait for something else to be the best thing ever after Electron. Decent alternatives are standard Web applications that don't help the goals of Google turning the Web into ChromeOS.
        wayneftw 5y ago
        Sure, everyone wants to be old on the Internet. I hear these twenty somethings constantly claiming that they’re in their sixties cuz it’s cool. /s No, to tolerate something you need to have some measure of control over it in the first place. Given that you don’t have any control over Electron or other developers using it, you’re not actually tolerating anything. You have no choice in the matter. The only thing you could possibly do resembling tolerance would be to not comment on it... but you’re doing the opposite, even when nobody asked and in places you shouldn’t be. You’re essentially just sitting here sneering at the community based on your ideology and your comments are not interesting or even practical. Standard web applications that run in a browser are not an alternative and given that completely unreasonable suggestion I’ll just assume that this is satire. Good luck stemming the tide!
- simonw 5y ago
  XUL was replaced by HTML and CSS - the UI for modern Firefox used to be XUL, now it's HTML (actually XHTML, I guess they couldn't quite kick the XML part of it): https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/master/browser/base/content/browser.xhtml https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/master/browser/bas...
  - jd3 5y ago
    I assume they meant XULRunner[0], which was Mozilla's spiritual predecessor to Electron. Some abandoned modern alternatives included Chromeless[1], Positron[2][3] and qbrt[4][5]. While technically possible using Firefox's XULRunner functionality (`firefox --app app.ini` — mostly undocumented, potentially unsupported in the future), as far as I can tell, Mozilla has abandoned the Electron approach for XUL/Gecko bundling, which is a shame since Firefox itself is basically just an implementation on top of the Gecko XUL runtime. > "[Firefox] is distributed as the combination of a Gecko XUL runtime — libxul, other shared libraries, and non-browser-specific resources like those in toolkit/ — plus a Firefox XUL application — mostly just the files in Contents/Resources/browser/, plus the 'firefox' stub executable that loads Gecko and points it at a XUL application" [6] On Android, there is also Geckoview[7][8] for embedding gecko. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner [1]: https://github.com/mozilla/chromeless https://github.com/mozilla/chromeless [2]: https://github.com/mozilla/positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron [3]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.o... [4]: https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt [5]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210601133844/https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/15/introducing-qbrt/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210601133844/https://mykzilla.o... [6]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/#comment-949 http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.o... [7]: https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview [8]: https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/ https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/
    - jd3 5y ago
      > ...currently the only way to build something on Gecko is to build a XUL application. > You can do that in-tree by adding a XUL app to a fork of mozilla-central, like Positron does; you can do it out-of-tree in a distinct repo that uses a copy of Firefox and its –app flag to run the app, which I suspect is what mkaply is doing; or you can take a hybrid approach like Thunderbird (although this is deprecated and only supported for that app). > In all cases, however, you’re building a XUL app, and a XUL app running on Firefox via –app is almost as capable and flexible as one built in-tree (except that you can’t make changes to Gecko itself). > So it isn’t clear to me why developers wouldn’t build serious applications with that approach. Firefox itself is a serious application that uses that approach. http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/#comment-949 http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.o...

by 55555 5y ago

ad404b8a372f2b9 5y ago

It's not a problem of semantics or naming purity, it's a practical issue of resource consumption and UI/UX.

Zababa 5y ago
It's a tradeoff from some resources to other resources. If you want a native app, you can invest time to make one or money to pay someone to make one. If you don't, you'll have to pay with more CPU/RAM/brain power usage.

pjmlp 5y ago

Small collection of Electron predecessors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL https://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/The_Wonderful_Widgetised_World_of_Web_Runtime.php https://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/The_Wonderful_... Eventually Electron will join them.

wayneftw 5y ago
Pffft. Okay. That's quite a reach you've got there! ...as if any of those were ever near the same caliber as Electron in just about any aspect of user or developer needs. > Eventually Electron will join them. Perhaps it will, eventually, but not until we have better native desktop kits that fill the needs that Electron is serving right now and if they don't let you build apps with the most popular programming language in the world (that'd be JavaScript) then you can just forget it about it.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  The good thing of being an old dog at this game is seeing technology of the same caliber as Electron, whatever that is supposed to mean, come and go every couple of years. So I just tolerate it, while the pendulum reaches its point of maximum displacement.
  - wayneftw 5y ago
    Yeah I've only been programming since around 1981. Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're not the only old timer around here. "Whatever that is supposed to mean", but you've still been seeing it? That makes no sense. None of those kits you listed have nearly the same robust quality of UX or DX as Electron. None of the technologies listed here even had a dependency manager (LOL). 3 of the kits weren't even cross platform! Tolerate it? By making off-topic complaints about it on every post about a desktop app built with Electron, in an attempt to deride the conversation about the actual subject? Without even have a suggestion for a decent alternative? Clearly there's some sort of disconnect with reality here.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Everyone is a dog on Internet, and yes I do tolerate and can't wait for something else to be the best thing ever after Electron. Decent alternatives are standard Web applications that don't help the goals of Google turning the Web into ChromeOS.
      - wayneftw 5y ago
        Sure, everyone wants to be old on the Internet. I hear these twenty somethings constantly claiming that they’re in their sixties cuz it’s cool. /s No, to tolerate something you need to have some measure of control over it in the first place. Given that you don’t have any control over Electron or other developers using it, you’re not actually tolerating anything. You have no choice in the matter. The only thing you could possibly do resembling tolerance would be to not comment on it... but you’re doing the opposite, even when nobody asked and in places you shouldn’t be. You’re essentially just sitting here sneering at the community based on your ideology and your comments are not interesting or even practical. Standard web applications that run in a browser are not an alternative and given that completely unreasonable suggestion I’ll just assume that this is satire. Good luck stemming the tide!
simonw 5y ago
XUL was replaced by HTML and CSS - the UI for modern Firefox used to be XUL, now it's HTML (actually XHTML, I guess they couldn't quite kick the XML part of it): https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/master/browser/base/content/browser.xhtml https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/master/browser/bas...
- jd3 5y ago
  I assume they meant XULRunner[0], which was Mozilla's spiritual predecessor to Electron. Some abandoned modern alternatives included Chromeless[1], Positron[2][3] and qbrt[4][5]. While technically possible using Firefox's XULRunner functionality (`firefox --app app.ini` — mostly undocumented, potentially unsupported in the future), as far as I can tell, Mozilla has abandoned the Electron approach for XUL/Gecko bundling, which is a shame since Firefox itself is basically just an implementation on top of the Gecko XUL runtime. > "[Firefox] is distributed as the combination of a Gecko XUL runtime — libxul, other shared libraries, and non-browser-specific resources like those in toolkit/ — plus a Firefox XUL application — mostly just the files in Contents/Resources/browser/, plus the 'firefox' stub executable that loads Gecko and points it at a XUL application" [6] On Android, there is also Geckoview[7][8] for embedding gecko. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner [1]: https://github.com/mozilla/chromeless https://github.com/mozilla/chromeless [2]: https://github.com/mozilla/positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron [3]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.o... [4]: https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt [5]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210601133844/https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/15/introducing-qbrt/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210601133844/https://mykzilla.o... [6]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/#comment-949 http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.o... [7]: https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview [8]: https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/ https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/
  - jd3 5y ago
    > ...currently the only way to build something on Gecko is to build a XUL application. > You can do that in-tree by adding a XUL app to a fork of mozilla-central, like Positron does; you can do it out-of-tree in a distinct repo that uses a copy of Firefox and its –app flag to run the app, which I suspect is what mkaply is doing; or you can take a hybrid approach like Thunderbird (although this is deprecated and only supported for that app). > In all cases, however, you’re building a XUL app, and a XUL app running on Firefox via –app is almost as capable and flexible as one built in-tree (except that you can’t make changes to Gecko itself). > So it isn’t clear to me why developers wouldn’t build serious applications with that approach. Firefox itself is a serious application that uses that approach. http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/#comment-949 http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.o...