HN Explorer

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

2 points by fileeditview ↗ HN
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

5 comments

[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 19.0 ms ] thread
lalo2302
You are describing either 1) an Electron app; 2) A website; 3) A shortcut
fileeditview
Not sure what your comment intends to say. I also have no idea what you mean with 3) A shortcut.

Of course an Electron app or a website are similar to what I describe because it all uses web technologies for the ui frontend, which always means some kind of browser. You could even argue if an electron app is just some kind of website.

But again.. not sure what you are getting at and if you tried to answer my question.

verdverm
On ChromeOS, and probably others, you can create a shortcut accessible from the OS launcher which just opens a URL in the browser. (You might like ChromeOS, basically everything runs in a browser tab without electron)

This is how I do slack and a ton of other apps. Just type the name, no need to recall the URL. You can do this with multiple subpages on the same URL as well

Someone
“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.

fileeditview
Good to know. This is however free software. I wonder if there is commercial software that chose this route.