Electron entered the chat.

Dwedit · on Feb 19, 2024

I blame Firefox and other web browsers which deny loading JS files if your page was loaded from file://. If you could simply run an HTML file from your hard drive and have a fully functional web application, you wouldn't need Electron.

mjburgess · on Feb 19, 2024

They would also, presumably, need to provide a whole native OS api for a variety of syscalls (etc.) that wouldnt otherwise be supported.

crabmusket · on Feb 19, 2024

Exactly. Electron provides a backend which allows filesystem access, device access, etc. which a plain web app cannot get access to.

Bene592 · on Feb 19, 2024

They could ship a web server that listens on 127.0.0.1 and launches the standard browser

cxr · on Feb 20, 2024

Not sure what you're referring to. Files opened from disk in Firefox aren't forbidden from running JS.

Dwedit · on Feb 20, 2024

Files opened from disk can run JS. But you can't do <script src="otherfile.js"> without getting a cross-origin error, even if it's in the same directory. So any kind of code organization at all is prohibited.

cxr · on Feb 22, 2024

  ~/scratch/wrong$ cat ./index.html
  <!doctype html>
  <html>
  <head>
  <script src="otherfile.js"></script>
  </head>
  <body>
  <p>otherfile.js did not run</p>
  </body>
  </html>

  ~/scratch/wrong$ cat ./otherfile.js 
  window.onload = (() => {
    document.querySelector("p").textContent = "wrong.  (otherfile.js ran)";
  });