Mastodawn

So Electron apps can be pretty heavy due mostly to the Electron runtime and the problem is multiplied by for every electron app you have, but I have a solution.

Instead of bundling the Electron runtime time with each application, you instead have a single Electron runtime container that the user installs and individual applications run on top of that. And since the application and run time are now separate, the application could be stored on a remote server and the user could access them on demand taking burden of installing updates off the user and they only need to worry about their Electron run time app.

Imagine a global spiderweb of remotely hosted electron apps

@bridget Sounds really complicated - I don’t think it will gain acceptance. 😉

@sigmasternchen @bridget I've heard about it actually, but it's a whole other frontier. "New land" if you will.

@bridget We could call that the Super Sphere Spiderweb or something.

@Sylvhem @bridget The earth electron environment!

Chronocide 1d ago

@bridget I think you have just discovered The Web Browser :tm:

cthos 🐱1d ago

@bridget We could call it... "world wide electron" 🤔

Luna Dragofelis ΘΔ🏳️‍⚧️🐱2d ago

@bridget Even for offline apps, they could use a locally running server to be accessed through the browser using a localhost URL.

Radek Pietruszewski 1d ago

@LunaDragofelis @bridget Web apps can also use service workers to work fully offline

@bridget nice, nice...

Radek Pietruszewski 1d ago

@bridget jokes aside, Tauri (on macOS and Windows) just uses the system browser runtime (WebKit / Edge's Chromium), which drastically cuts on package size and memory consumption.

@bridget ok i know this is a joke but a lot of developers use electron to build applications that don't require a network connection to function, and under that (specific) model, those would break if taken offline

@SRAZKVT @bridget You can also make it offline only with a .html file or whatever. I have a couple of things that do that.

Devs also have gone the other direction. Via immediately springs to mind. For no apparent reason whatsoever, this physical hardware management app is online only. (I can understand checking for updates/updated definitions, but no, the whole blasted thing runs off of github or whatever.) It isn't that it can't work offline. They just didn't care. (And yeah, a third party fork by Cebby has fixed that, proving that, in fact, it can work perfectly fine offline.)

I don't think Electron, in itself, actually encourages or even meaningfully pushes devs towards making something offline capable any more than anything else.

Marcel ♾1d ago

@nazokiyoubinbou @SRAZKVT @bridget You can also make a progressive web app with offline support that's fully installable using your favourite browser, including offline support, e.g. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps

Progressive web apps | MDN

A progressive web app (PWA) is an app that's built using web platform technologies, but that provides a user experience like that of a platform-specific app.

MDN Web Docs

Mathaetaes 1d ago

@bridget Was the electron runtime coded to support multiple simultaneous apps?

If everyone is bundling the runtime, it seems like maybe a core assumption in the electron runtime is that it's only supporting a single app. If that's the case, you may run into all kinds of unexpected consequences as apps clobber each others' data in singleton objects, etc. It's especially bad when apps can access each others' data... a single malicious ad package bundled into a cheap app could run rampant and harvest stuff from everything else if proper segmentation isn't in place, and if a core assumption is 1 runtime, 1 app, segmentation most certainly isn't in place.

I know virtually nothing about electron, but I've seen enough distributed systems fail pretty colossally because the underlying framework made this assumption, then devs violated it.

I like the idea in theory, though, and I'm sure with effort it could come to fruition.

@mathaetaes @bridget The OP is literally talking about the Web. You have a browser and you can open multiple tabs at once even.

As a point of clarity, Electron is basically just a (barely) slimmed down Chromium, so it very likely can handle multiple apps at once.

Inukshuk 1d ago

@mathaetaes @bridget I know OP was joking, but since the question came up: you can run different apps using a shared Electron runtime. In fact, on Arch Linux many Electron apps are bundled like this today and when packaged with Flatpak on Linux it also works that way. It is unfortunate that the standard tooling has not adopted this strategy.

@bridget that's an awesome idea! The app could become so lightweight that you could even do it for things where it doesn't make a lot of sense now. I'm picturing something like distributing seldom-updated information. Kind of like an encyclopedia, you know?

Tim Johnsen 1d ago

Kevin Granade 1d ago

@bridget you really had me concerned in the first half >_<

@bridget What an amazing idea. But I don't know. It sounds way too complicated. I don't think it can be done.

Oh... wait...

Honestly, I sort of liked the idea of it in some ways initially. Bundle the basic dependencies together with the software. My issue is mostly that they didn't go for a minimalism. If anything they've almost gone for a maximalism... Pretty soon I suppose Electron apps will even include Google's """local""" """"""""""""""AI"""""""""""""" model. (Yeah, I have to be, ah, generous with the quotes on that...)

We need to bring back the equivalent of, say, Visual Basic with its compiled .exe files and actually putting the blasted DLL files in there with them and then just be done with it.

Jernej Simončič �1d ago

@bridget Sounds too complicated. Let's put two different Chromium runtimes in the application instead!

@bridget once I saw where you were going with that, I shot coffee out my beak.

Excellent!

(Uninstalling my Java Virtual Machine) 🙂

@bridget this sounds a bit like websites, with extra steps

Richard Penner 1d ago

@bridget I’m on MacOS and when I see electron, I reach for npx run-electron and if that doesn’t work I move on. :)

Ra (Freyja) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩 1d ago

@bridget I believe this may be called *checks notes* a web browser

Miss Rari 🏳️‍⚧️1d ago

@bridget Arch kinda does this since it has a separate Electron package.

Daniel Lakeland 1d ago

@bridget
I feel like this post needs to be submitted to some psychologists for inclusion into a test for ability to read subtext and irony.

Alien software, human hardware 1d ago

@bridget did you just reinvent Java? :D

@bridget That'll never catch on! ^^

Niels Moseley 1d ago

@bridget I dunno Bridget, I doubt it will catch on.

Jess Robinson 1d ago

@bridget such things do exist, see Ferdium..