alt Hacker NewsBack 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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andyferris • yesterday at 10:03 PM
The OS's do provide webviews pretty uniformly, and the browser engines they ship with behave more similarly than in the days of IE.
Modern Windows already offers exactly this, including defaulting to evergreen but having the option to bundle, in WebView2 https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview...
But they dropped plans to support it on macOS and Linux so it's a bit useless as an Electron replacement. Not that it was exactly a drop in for Electron - it's web based but with a different set of extra APIs. I don't think things will move as fast to something else now that apps are already built on Electron and the savings is for the user rather than the developer. It really needs to be 100% Electron compatible, just with the difference in launch behavior.