this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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Sounds fun, but I wish there were more people who'd invest in making Firefox's Gecko more easy to use (stretch goal: revive Proton, which is Electron but Firefox) instead of pushing a ton of effort into inventing a new thing.
That said, this is coming from SerenityOS (specifically, the founder and basically the entire community concentrating on building its browser instead of hacking the OS, resulting in a split), so I understand that it might be a lot harder to port large codebases to a new OS instead of than starting a new one.
Edit: It's Positron, not Proton
Well we wouldn't want Proton, it would be 2000x less lightweight than electron! /s
It seems to me that Tauri is maybe a better direction to invest resources in than a direct electron-but-Firefox. Its lighter weight and better sandboxed, and can presumably be configured to run with a Gecko engine instead of a chromium-based webview. I have no idea its status, but geckoview does seem to exist.
Ah shit we need photon. Light as light itself
Proton and photon is just the Firefox browser's GUI style. Proton is the previous one, photon is the current one where everything is bigger and curly.
Yeah, I meant Positron, my bad
Sounds like fun, but I wish we had a real multiplatform GUI framework that does not look like ass and does not perform like ass, so we can put the whole shameful electron era behind us.
That's never going to happen, and the reasons are twofold:
Brands want to push their own style on people, to make themselves recognizable, and to push their ideas about UX to their users (because they obviously know better than the OS/DE/compositor/whatever people).
It's easier and cheaper to build a web app, because there are so many web developers. It also usually allows you to give an "app" to people who want that, while giving a (perhaps somewhat limited) browser version to everyone else, reaching the maximum amount of users while maintaining only a single codebase and keeping everything more or less cohesive and looking the same.
That’s not a universal behavior though. There’s so many utilities and simpler apps made by indie developers or smaller companies that don’t care about this.
That's technically true, but the apps "everyone" has are the opposite to that, and people are used to it and don't really seem to complain. So if Facebook, Tiktok, Twitter, Amazon, Spotify and Aliexpress each do their own (garbage) thing, it shows other brands they can do that too, and they kinda ruin it for everyone. Basically the apps you spend most time in are probably like that, and it's a shitty experience.
It just makes too much sense... The only way to get past electron is a better electron. Or just fix electron
We've been going after this concept for decades now. That's what java swing was supposed to be, what python gtlk was supposed to be, and I'm sure there were others before that and there's been a hell of a lot since then
It's all trade-offs between flexibility, ease of use, and performance. Also between maintenance cost, portability, and existing library support
Electron is a good compromise. The execution could be better, but it's come a long way. There is no one size fits all solution, but there are some decent options that handle that compromise differently
These people started it and are doing it for fun.
Fixing few decades of technical debt is not fun and a big question would be if their code would even be considered for existing engines.
It us so much fin it already has over 1000 contributors. It got us 1k more people that understand browsers deeply. I think that's a huge win whatever happens with browser itself
You don’t have to fix technical debt to just incorporate the engine unless you’re porting it to an entirely new operating system.