It was just an HTML page with a ".hta" file extension. Opening such a file would open it in a chrome-less browser, and give the scripting in the page access to the file system.

I used to love these things. I wrote a bunch of little apps in them.

Some examples:

https://medium.com/@anht_59851/html-application-hta-a-gui-for-your-scripting-on-windows-bfaacf2c3bdd

These still exist, but there are problems with them:

1. Coding is a bear. They run in the mshta.exe process, and that spawns an instance of... IE9, I think? There's no "inspect" panel, for instance, and errors just pop a modal with no debugging information.

2. Near as I can tell, they use an older version of ECMAScript. "let" doesn't seem to work, not does "addEventListener," etc. I kept getting weird "Syntax Errors" for things that appeared to be valid, contemporary JavaScript.

3. I'm quite sure some security software (like on my laptop, issued by employer), blocks these from executing.

What's the current-day equivalent of these? I want to write an HTML page complete with CSS and JS, double-click on it from my desktop, have it open in a browser instance of its own, and have access to the file system.

I essentially want a way to create little GUI apps, without having to use WinForms.

What am I looking for? Is it Electron?

(Note: I'm on Windows)