Electron?

[Wowfunhappy]

I'm very much not a fan of Electron (because it's a resource-consuming monstrosity), but like it or not, Electron forms the basis for a lot of applications nowadays, from VSCode to Discord. Electron generally supports the same OS's that Google Chrome does, which means most Electron apps compiled today will support OS X 10.11 and above.

Has anyone ever looked into using the Chromium Legacy patches to compile a 10.7-compatible version of the Electron framework? Would you expect it to work? I suspect no one will actually have the energy for such a project (including me), but it might be interesting to discuss...

[RJVB]

This would definitely be of interest to me. I use Ferdium, something you can describe as a lightweight browser designed for social media & messengers, without extension support, but with a few other nifty tricks like hibernating "tabs" with a periodic opening of 1 eye to check & alert for new messages. I also use it for forums and even A'zon which tends to work a bit better under Chrome than Firefox (my main browser).

It's evident that even using a lightweight browser as your runtime environment for simple apps is a significant waste of resources but it turns out to be not so bad when used as described above. Firstly because it allows you to concentrate less essential services in an application that you are less hesitant to quit (and quitting the entire app has to release more resources than just closing a multi-tab window, IMHO). But it turns out that the Ferdium app cited above is actually significantly smaller in totoal memory footprint as reported by my copy of Memory Cleaner than having about half the same "services" open in tabs of a single Chromium window.

(I have not checked how much of the Chromium overhead is due to all the extensions I have plus 26 years of accumulated bookmarks.)

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How much of a "direct copy" of chromium/blink/whatever is there in Electron?

[krackers]

How much of a "direct copy" of chromium/blink/whatever is there in Electron?

I think one difference is that Electron apparently uses nodeJS instead of V8. I found https://blog.logrocket.com/advanced-electron-js-architecture/

and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70620182/whats-the-diffrence-between-cef-and-electron

Electron embeds Chromium and Node.js in its binary, enabling web developers to write desktop applications without writing native code. Electron implements a multi-process model composed of the main and renderer processes, which is similar to the Chromium browser.

I guess the nodeJS needs to be in there in addition to v8 since v8 by itself doesn't provide any host apis, and at the same time you don't want things like webviews displayed to have access to host apis, so there needs to sort of be two "separate" JS runtimes with different privilege levels? Seems like a mess.

There's also chromium embedded framework.

[RJVB]

Isn't nodejs a dependency for Electron? A quick check in the MacPorts tree shows that nodejs 15+ require 10.9 as the minimum OS version.

[RJVB]

There's also chromium embedded framework.

In Electron, or something else? There's also QtWebengine... the Qt layer is supposedly written so it can be built against other (older) Qt versions. I've managed myself to get Qt 5.9 to build and run on 10.9 and it would be nice to have a newer web engine in the few apps I have that need more than (the rebooted) QtWebkit.

[krackers]

I think it probably does make use of CEF. Maybe if anyone has spare time and CPU cycles they could start by seeing whether it's possible to build CEF from chromium-legacy (as I understand everything should already be in tree, it's just a matter of finding the right build commands).

But looking at https://www.electronjs.org/blog/electron-internals-building-chromium-as-a-library it seems Electron doesn't use the official CEF library.

ery early versions of Atom editor and NW.js used CEF.

To maintain a stable API, CEF hides all the details of Chromium and wraps Chromium's APIs with its own interface. So when we needed to access underlying Chromium APIs, like integrating Node.js into web pages, the advantages of CEF became blockers.

So in the end both Electron and NW.js switched to using Chromium's APIs directly.

So verifying that CEF works is probably necessary but not sufficient.