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zamadatix • yesterday at 7:36 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

I think the biggest fault in Electron is not just that it's inefficient web tech but that it has no provision for shared instances between apps, instead foricing every app to be the one which only ever wants to use the EXACT locally bundled copy of Chromium+Node which should launch in isolation of any others. This isn't even something Electron needs to die and be replaced for, just an optional feature other similar tools have jumped on for years now.

I'm sure exact pinning is sometimes the real intended case for certain apps, as it is a value in certain ways, but I'd bet at least half the Electron apps I have running now would happily be using the same shared instance of the same LTS Chromium+Node if it were the out of the box behavior to be able to do so.


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mschuster91 • yesterday at 9:34 PM

Back in the Windows era... you could embed Internet Explorer as an ActiveX control in your VB6 app and interface with it, albeit very rudimentary.

Maybe, since Electron has evolved as a somewhat common standard... the major OS providers should get together and revive this idea. The OS provides, similar to say Java JRE, a base runtime of a browser and a JS interpreter with a specified set of helper APIs to use local functionality such as filesystem access, raw networking, notifications, yadda yadda, and apps just call that runtime.

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