I think there's an inevitable undeniable need some something like Electron, but it needs to be well supported and ubiquitous.
Before Electron there was xulrunner, whose main purpose in life was to be the cross platform application layer of the Firefox web browser.
Even though it was officially an unreleased "technology experiment", xulrunner was successfully used both internally at Mozilla to develop Thunderbird and Sunbird, and externally to develop other cross-platform desktop apps like TomTom Home, Uploadr, Nightingale, Songbird, Miro, Joost, Lotus Notes, etc.
But xulrunner was never as fully fleshed out and widely used as Electron, and Mozilla was never serious enough about supporting xulrunner as a platform for other applications, for it to be viable in the long term.
It never caught on and became a standard, and now it's obsolete.
>XULRunner is a "technology experiment", not a shipped product, meaning there are no "official" XULRunner releases, only stable builds based on the same code as a corresponding Firefox release.
>Mozilla stopped supporting the development of XULrunner in July 2015.
In order to solve the problem of every application shipping with its own web browser, there needs to be ONE standard Electron shell that can run all those simple apps and even the advanced ones, and apps need to be able safely include their own native code extensions.
Many people developing Electron apps explicitly and legitimately WANT their app to include the whole web browser, just so they don't have to expend any effort supporting other browsers.
Electron needs to mature and become stable enough that there can be one global install that runs all apps.
But that requires long term support, and a big enough well funded team working on it full time.
Just as all the successful corporations who built on top of OpenSSH have an moral obligation to support its developers, I think successful companies making money by shipping big fat Electron apps today have a moral obligation to support the development of a standard Electron shell.
I remember XULRunner, but never used it. Do you know if it was any lighter weight, or how much so, than Electron?
> I think successful companies making money by shipping big fat Electron apps today have a moral obligation to support the development of a standard Electron shell.
I agree completely. The issue that I mainly see, with the possible exception of Linux, it's a drop in the bucket of number of users (and has it's own issues GDK vs. QT/KDE), the main adversaries have traditionally been the OS builders. They actively seem to be intentionally creating a walled garden model.
Before Electron there was xulrunner, whose main purpose in life was to be the cross platform application layer of the Firefox web browser.
Even though it was officially an unreleased "technology experiment", xulrunner was successfully used both internally at Mozilla to develop Thunderbird and Sunbird, and externally to develop other cross-platform desktop apps like TomTom Home, Uploadr, Nightingale, Songbird, Miro, Joost, Lotus Notes, etc.
But xulrunner was never as fully fleshed out and widely used as Electron, and Mozilla was never serious enough about supporting xulrunner as a platform for other applications, for it to be viable in the long term.
It never caught on and became a standard, and now it's obsolete.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner
>XULRunner is a "technology experiment", not a shipped product, meaning there are no "official" XULRunner releases, only stable builds based on the same code as a corresponding Firefox release.
>Mozilla stopped supporting the development of XULrunner in July 2015.
In order to solve the problem of every application shipping with its own web browser, there needs to be ONE standard Electron shell that can run all those simple apps and even the advanced ones, and apps need to be able safely include their own native code extensions.
Many people developing Electron apps explicitly and legitimately WANT their app to include the whole web browser, just so they don't have to expend any effort supporting other browsers.
Electron needs to mature and become stable enough that there can be one global install that runs all apps.
But that requires long term support, and a big enough well funded team working on it full time.
Just as all the successful corporations who built on top of OpenSSH have an moral obligation to support its developers, I think successful companies making money by shipping big fat Electron apps today have a moral obligation to support the development of a standard Electron shell.
Think of it as buying carbon credits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_credit