Ask HN: Would buy a desktop app that launches its UI as a browser tab?

2 points

6 years ago

I see a lot of dislike against Electron apps and I share it to some degree. I have however over the last months looked into "native" cross-platform libraries/frameworks and the choice is very limited.

I am currently wondering how open people would be to "alternative" solutions when buying a desktop app.

E.g. are there apps that just open a tab in your browser to show their UI? Do you find this acceptable or a no-go for a desktop app?

There would also be the option to launch a new browser window with certain features disabled (such as URL bar, menu, etc.).

I know that the resource consumption would probably be similar to electron. However at least the distribution packages would be smaller.

Then there is the webview[1] solution. It uses Cocoa/WebKit on macOS, gtk-webkit2 on Linux and Edge on Windows 10 as respective backends. My guess is that this would be the most accepted of the listed solutions.. what do you think?

[1]: https://github.com/webview/webview

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