Shrinkray: Lightweight alternative to Electron

github.com

41 points·letalvoj··8 comments

I'm not sure that you can call this an "alternative" to Electron if it only supports macOS. I think the main selling point of Electron is the ability to build cross-platform GUI apps, which Shrinkray doesn't provide.

Remember when you could only download OSX executables from the Atom home page [1]?

In my experience, projects that are OSX first often work horribly on other platforms (the poster child being itunes). Hence I switched to Visual Studio Code the second it became available.

[1] they gave you build instructions for linux & windows. Which almost never worked.

How does this compare with Electrino, which was on top of Hacker News a few days ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14260755

And I have to agree with other commenters that this will only truly be an alternative if it could be cross-platform. It seems cross-platform support is possible (by using each OS's own browser runtime), but then you'd have discrepancies between platforms which takes us back to square one.

Electrino is also only macOS at this point

As far as I can tell it's just a web view wrapper for desktop. It's missing all the node features that Electron or NW.js add, which makes me wonder... why not just run it in a browser like normal?

It is not lightweight, it just takes less disk space.

WebKit is generally easier on resources than Chromium/Blink is, sometimes to the tune of multiple hours longer battery life. So while it's still not lightweight, it's more lightweight than Electron is.

Seems that we start to find Electron heavy-weight a problem.

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