Quark

> I kind of wonder why it took this long for someone to try this approach. It just makes a whole lot more sense on the surface. Like other replies have mentioned, it's not a new idea DeskGap uses the native OS Webviews. https://github.com/patr0nus/DeskGap/ Electrino (4 years old) was an experiment where they forked Electron and removed Chromium to replace it with the native OS Web views. https://github.com/pojala/electrino Quark is a fork of Electrino: https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark There's also a way of building desktop GUIs using Deno, which uses Deno Webview, which is a binding for the same webview library that Tauri uses. https://denotutorials.net/making-desktop-gui-applications-us... https://github.com/webview/webview

I don't think that the web is fundamentally slow! I do think Chromium in particular has become a major resource hog. Firefox, which doesn't have Safari's platform advantage, opens more quickly and takes up much less memory than Chrome (even as it still uses up battery quickly). Gnome Web, a Linux webkit-based browser for Linux, also performs quite admirably, so I'm not convinced Safari's success is simply due to its macOS integration. There've been a couple attempts to build electron-like frameworks that use the OS's native webview, but they don't seem to have gained that much traction. Deskgap is probably the most mature of them, relatively speaking. https://deskgap.com/ https://github.com/pojala/electrino https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark

Any relation to https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark ?

I _believe_ they are doing this because they are heavily investing in Electron (Skype, Visual Studio Code, Teams, more). Having both Chromium and V8 be part of Edge (and the OS) means they can remove them as bundled dependencies from Electron on Windows and lighten the payload of those apps. I wouldn't be surprised if we see future Windows builds of Electron becoming smaller because of this. There is not proof of this, this is just a hunch I have. Eletrino[1] and Quark[2] tried tackling this idea of using native OS engines but they seem to just be side projects and/or experiments. [1] https://github.com/pojala/electrino [2] https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark

Hi HN, DeskGap is another try to build an lightweight alternative to Electron. Compared to the existing attempts [0, 1], I choose not to go that far and bundle a real Node.js with it[2]. And to battle test the framework, I wrapped squoosh[3] into a desktop app[4] with DeskGap, and successfully submitted it to the app stores. [0] https://github.com/pojala/electrino [1] https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark [2] https://deskgap.com/#faq [3] https://squoosh.app [4] https://github.com/patr0nus/Pym/

This is something Electron itself can probably do and I can see why some people might be interested in shipping their Electron apps without Chromium. There is also Quark[1] and and Electrino[2] that do this with branding APIs. [1] https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark [2] https://github.com/pojala/electrino

From what I can tell, Electrino is a dead project. Looks like someone picked up the idea and is making another called Quark (https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark) though.