this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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Wouldn't it be great if there was a way for all these electron apps to share the same runtime so people don't have to bundle it with their applications.
You know, I bet if the applications without the runtime are small enough, you could probably stream them directly from the internet without even downloading anything up front!
I guess that shared runtime would need some way to browse the applications....
^(vscode gets a pass)
Use the system webview, you cowards!
Developers bundle all of Chromium, because they're afraid the OS webview will have a different browser engine. Testing is too hard…
This is such a terrible excuse — usually the same app runs in browsers too, so it already has to deal with even wider variety of browser engines.
Tauri moment
I will say that unless something's changed in Windows recently, the win32 API webview is still a vestigial version of internet explorer due to Microsoft's obsession with non breaking changes (not saying that's a bad thing)
Given I lived through those years as an engineer, I completely understand people wanting to avoid that particular ancient eldritch horror.
Edit: apparently there's webview2 now based on edge (and therefore chromium), I take it all back
I mean even for something like .NET, apps install the version of the runtime they need in a shared space, so that they can be used by everyone desiring that specific version.
Ooh! Just unlocked a memory of a computer I was setting up and one piece of software assumed its version of .NET would be present and just failed install every time because it wasn't. I ended up just installing it later once I had other stuff installed
You mean instead of downloading the app, we could just browse through them? That's a revolutionary concept. We could call them hyper-apps!
Outside of PWA shortcomings, I believe there's a way to have a .NET application run a WebView with Edge (Chromium). I believe Windows 11 has both pre-installed now.
I don't even want to run NodeJS anymore. I would run all my server apps on headless Chromium if I could.
Don't bundle your app, let the CDNs do their job. God damn, that's revolutionary.
Hopefully your idea takes off like the idiot that started the "monorepos" craze.
To your credit, your idea is actually good.
You’d better be talking about code oss