HACKER Q&A
📣 fileeditview

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


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

  👤 Someone Accepted Answer ✓
“are there apps that just open a tab in your browser to show their UI?”

pgAdmin (https://www.pgadmin.org/) does that (at least on a Mac). Acceptable? Yes. Good? No, but part of that is that the web UI doesn’t feel good.

Edit: the page it opens isn’t on the Internet, it’s served by a web server that the application runs. That means it runs without an internet connection, but also (for better or for worse) that you have to update the application to update the UI.

👤 lalo2302
You are describing either 1) an Electron app; 2) A website; 3) A shortcut