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Comment by cocktailpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

What's the benefit of using this instead of Electron? Genuinely curious about the benefit.

Is Gecko better than Chromium in certain cases?

One difference (Don't know if its a benefit) is that it uses a common runtime. Two qbrt apps would use the same installed version of Firefox Nightly, so app download sizes would be smaller. If you read these electron threads this is something that comes up a lot.

Firefox's latest build made significant RAM usage improvements [1], leapfrogging Chrome when it came to multiple tabs.

[1][http://www.techradar.com/news/firefoxs-blazing-speed-with-hu...]

If I package up my app and ship for Windows, and you package up your app and ship for Windows, how do the two apps use a common runtime?

hm... maybe providing something like a VC++ runtime installer? if it's about portable exes, then I'd like to know more :)

the same way that the JVM works, at least in theory.

You have the base virtual machine installed, and then the app just needs to ship the code itself.

You could even ship with an "install script header", like "if this isn't installed, offer to download and install it". I imagine a lot of us have seen these kinds of installers before.

I don't understand how that would be different than Electron or nw.js.

For example, if there were a Debian package for either of those, all apps leveraging them would just declare that same package a dependency and you'd have a single system-wide install for the large binary everyone keeps complaining about. (AFAICT there is no such deb package for any of the above.)

Electron is designed to be bundled into your app, I'm not aware of any distros/package tools that allow Electron apps to share a runtime.

The JVM (and apparently qbrt) is designed to be shared, apps are expected to use the installed system version of the VM, though if the packager wants they can include a specific version to use.

I wish it were easy/possible to get Electron apps to share things, it bothers me that Chrome, Discord, and Slack almost certainly could share most of their hundreds of megabytes.

It appears both electron and nw.js can be installed through npm (though the electron one is more up-to-date than the nw.js one:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/nwjs

and electron:

https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-prebuilt

But your distributed applications certainly do not use those installed by npm, right?

You can install electron globally but if you package your app to target electron prebuilt you'd have to require the use to have installed both it and nodejs already.

It's not completely bonkers. It could be possible to make a web installer that checks for node and electron and downloads them if necessary. Nobody seems to do that though. Every electron app bundles electron. At least every one I've seen

Part of the problem here is that the entire JS ecosystem is built around local copies of things, so there might not be a lot of institutional knowledge in that corner of OSS to pull off the "shared env" thing quite well.

That plus scarring from browser differences over N years.

Of course it's still totally possible, but there are probably gotchas that aren't obvious if you're mainly a web developer.

You may bundle the Electron runtime in an app or not. An app is started by "electron main.js", so once Electron is installed you have just to download an app and create an icon. Example with https://github.com/Scriptol/Advanced-Editor

> One difference (Don't know if its a benefit) is that it uses a common runtime.

You keep saying this. It's not mentioned in the post, and it doesn't match how qbrt is actually doing things. Where are you seeing it?

> "Is Gecko better than Chromium in certain cases?"

Yes, in certain cases. However, I don't think it's worth another flame war about this. Even if I posted some benchmarks all you'd have is a stream of people sharing their anecdata trying to confirm or deny the accuracy of the benchmarks. Can we nip this in the bud before it begins and just be glad that Electron has some competition to help push it forward?

Agreed. I'm not a fan of web apps/wrappers in general, but they're here and they're clearly not going away any time soon, so it's important that they don't become steeped in a Blink-based monoculture. Competition is healthy.

my thoughts exactly. mozilla arguably set the ball rolling on this stuff with the Prism project, which allowed turning web-pages into chromeless browser window apps, with their own desktop icons and everything

In theory the app could actually be cross platform for every platform that supports nodejs and gecko instead of being only cross platform for the platforms that the developer wants to support. You'd have a generic build where native libraries are compiled with webassembly and then specialised builds for each supported platform for more performance.

Good point. If you don't have to build for architecture it could run anywhere

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