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Comment by urvader | Hacker News Reader

I used HTC a lot and waited for the other browsers to implement it. XBL came around but waited many years until it became web components. Great post!

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All this talk of HTCs reminds me of HTAs: HTML Applications.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb250409(v=vs.85).a...

They behaved like a native app, with control over their native chrome, and without any browser sandboxing: their JavaScript (JScript) or VBScript could use COM components to access to the file-system and other features, including loading other binaries in-process. File-system access was through Scripting.FileSystemObject, for example.

Some built-in Windows components were/are built as HTAs, like the previous versions of the Microsoft AntiMalware / Windows Defender UI.

I tried to use it for a project in 2013 but couldn't because HTAs are forced to run in Quirks-mode, so you can't use IE11's Edge mode, unfortunately.

Best of all: they ran while needing only a few megabytes of RAM. Compare with Electron-based apps and it makes me weep because this, right here, is evidence that a Web-View can be used as the basis for an application, using a platform that was available since 1998/1999, without it dragging my PC down.

You can still do this, and in OSX too using MacGap (or writing a tiny webview wrapper yourself). The main reasons this is not widely done are incomplete device APIs, no control over browser versions/features - app might break at any moment for different subsets of users, and the lack of cross-platform compatibility. Electron actually solves most of those pain points despite the heft.

Does the Cocoa WebView expose any kind of non-sandboxed COM-like API for system access? That was what made HTAs so useful.

I still use them - IE9 being the highest available engine is just as bad as you remember, but being able to quickly whip up a few-hundred KB app HR can all use off a network drive to automate tedious tasks like recurring data-driven document generation, with a decent React UI, is worth some of the pain.

This! I love simplicity of electron but it is absurdly resource hungry.

I don't agree that Electron is simple. Electron runs a Node.js instance as a websever and application server in-proc, while also running Blink/WebKit for each frame instance. There's no consolidation going on, and I feel for a majority of Electron applications there's no need for the Node instance because all they're serving is an Angular app using the built-in `chrome.` APIs. What would be simple is if a script tag in a single HTML file could access the filesystem or Windows registry - but under Electron they can't.

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