
Electron 3.0.0-beta.1 – Chrome 66 and Node 10 - STRiDEX
https://electronjs.org/releases#3.0.0-beta.1
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lern_too_spel
What are the remaining APIs that people need in Electron that are not
available in the web browser? And what's the timeline to getting those in the
browser to deprecate Electron?

In cases like Slack, I prefer using the webapp because I trust the Chrome team
to update quickly if there is a vulnerability in the browser. I do not trust
Slack to update its Electron app quickly if there is a vulnerability in
Chrome.

~~~
scrollaway
I would love to have the browser be a local "application server" on the
desktop. Currently, people hate electron because shipping and running
duplicate browsers is heavy-handed, insecure, and silly.

There's definitely a different feeling between having a running Discord/Slack
tab vs. using a native app for it, if you're using it a lot. A native
notification bar icon, shortcuts in the menus/app launchers, the app not
exiting if i need to restart the browser, the app not being affected by
extensions I install (adblockers, etc).

The app being _separate_ from the browser is good. But it should still be the
same engine running this. The same master process as well, possibly?

Either way, Electron has been a huge boon for apps being available natively on
Linux and that's just awesome. I don't want to lose that.

~~~
josteink
> I would love to have the browser be a local "application server" on the
> desktop

Back in the days we called that a WebView.

And when MS made one with MSIE and used that in Windows, we sent the EU after
them.

How times change, eh?

~~~
coldtea
> _And when MS made one with MSIE and used that in Windows, we sent the EU
> after them._

That was because they were a monopoly (among several other reasons, such as
"bundling", threatening OEMs and so on).

Not because they offered webviews (which was totally irrelevant).

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josteink
Iirc the embedding in the OS (aka the webview) was one of the major
complaints.

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hshehehjdjdjd
But ... chromium is not embedded in the OS?

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freedomben
Going to be starting a new electron app very soon (please, no comments about
whether it's the correct choice and we should be using ${favoriteLibrary}. We
discussed the pros and cons extensively, and we believe it is the best choice
for us and our domain).

Are the breaking changes here significant enough as to render existing
tutorials and such obsolete/inaccurate? If so, are there newer tutorials that
would be better?

~~~
cobar
They should be pretty minor. I've found that it's rare you need to rely on any
of the Electron APIs. For the most part, Electron just provides a shell to
load HTML/JS/CSS and that's where the overwhelming majority of the code lives.

The only time you need to access Electron APIs is to create and manage
windows, system menus, etc.

For all the hate against it, we've been very happy with Electron. There's no
way we'd have been able to afford to offer Windows and OS X given our limited
budget without it.

~~~
murukesh_s
Even with large budget it's pain to keep two codebase with different issue
trackers etc..

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cornholio
Is there a packaging option for Electron where I can point it to a bunch of
html files, and I get a 1MB installer, capable of dowloading and installing
the runtime on the target system, if not already present?

It seems like such an obvious solution used by all languages that require a
runtime.

~~~
ljm
There was an attempt with electrino [0] that has ultimately been abandoned
(I'm sure the author has posted their story here before). It aimed to provide
an electron compatible API over the native browser controls, which is
definitely ideal but not so much for those who just want to write for Chrome
and nothing else.

I think native app development might have a fair chance if it could adapt to
some of the decisions the web dev community (and communities using server-side
languages) have made over the years.

\- There was a fairly universal rejection of WYSIWYG editors after the
Frontpage/Dreamweaver era, once CSS2 and XHTML started to become a thing; yet
your default option for building a Mac or Windows app is to download around
6GB worth of IDE, interface builders, and other toolkits you'll never even
know you'll need before you can properly get started.

\- While you might consider a webpack or babel setup to have appropriated the
position, you don't require the solution or project file those editors build
to get a hello world up and running by hand. An index.html and an app.js is
enough to deploy an entire application.

\- hot code reloading and debugging in the UI is a breeze (react native and
flutter have been great for this too); no need to manually rebuild on each
change.

This comes at the cost of dealing with the usual web-dev bugbears, ones that
don't exist when you're working in C# or Obj-C or Swift or whatever, but the
browser has almost accidentally become this amazing environment for
experimental app development, that I imagine in some ways takes what Smalltalk
had to offer in a totally different direction.

It would be interesting to see what OS vendors could do to level the playing
field there. I enjoy doing native app development a lot but I do miss some of
what you get from working with JS and React.

[0] [https://github.com/pojala/electrino](https://github.com/pojala/electrino)

~~~
pjmlp
Dreamweaver is pretty much alive.

[https://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver.html](https://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver.html)

And it has Animate (nee Flash) and Spark as companions.

[https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html](https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html)

[https://www.adobe.com/products/spark.html](https://www.adobe.com/products/spark.html)

All of them also weight as much GB as most IDEs and yet not as easy as
something like Winforms or Delphi for the complete experience.

Regarding levelling the playing field, UWP supports WebApps and PWA apps
delivered via the store have access to UWP APIs, no need to have Electron
around.

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f3f3_
Nice to see Electron moving forward. Is there a place where a summary of the
changes coming in 3.0 can be found? Particularly regarding bloat - both in
terms of file size and memory usage?

~~~
nbst
The V8 memory improvements (as benchmarked in the official V8 blog) should
really help, but I agree it would be nice to see a benchmark for an Electron
Hello World.

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styfle
I like Electron, but there are alternatives.

I’ve been keeping a list of Desktop JS frameworks[0] that might interest web
devs wanting to make desktop apps.

[0]: [https://github.com/styfle/awesome-desktop-
js](https://github.com/styfle/awesome-desktop-js)

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lcnmrn
Isn’t possible to replace Chrome with another lightweight browser engine?

~~~
snarfy
An alternative to Electron is Webview[1]. For OSX and Linux it's based on
WebKit. For windows it uses IWebBrowser2. It's a tiny shim around the OS's
browser control.

[1] - [https://github.com/zserge/webview](https://github.com/zserge/webview)

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stillbourne
Yeah but when can I start using it on android and ios too? I still don't
understand why they don't try to make the platform truly crossplatform.

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stephenr
so you always have your phone plugged into power then?

~~~
stillbourne
I was thinking more about getting electron apps to work on my chromebook and
ios tablets.

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stephenr
Oh I'm so sorry I've misunderstood completely...

So you always have your tablet plugged into power then?

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nkkollaw
Does it by any chance provide a shared Chrome version across apps?

It seems possible to have a single (or 1 for every version) instance of Chrome
on the system, and Electron apps could use the same one, or tell Electron they
need another version and it could download it.

This would I _suspect_ reduce memory usage and app size.

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bigato
Using the browser installed in the system instead would reduce resource usage
even further </ironic>

~~~
nkkollaw
Yes but then what if apps are built for another version?

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RussianCow
Apps like Slack that expose a web version of the product are tested across
different browsers anyway, so that wouldn't change unless your Electron app
was desktop-only.

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veidr
Pooo Opportunity people put dd

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singularity2001
Long list of Breaking changes, some fixes, did I miss the features section or
are they inspired by angular.XX?

