Software Engineer and full-time Rustacean. While Rust is my primary language, I am also fluent in Python and Typescript. I'm also currently making a game with Godot using C#.
The one thing I like about putting a web browser in a desktop application is that HTML5/CSS is a very powerful language combo for designing layout and appearance. It is much more powerful and flexible than any GUI library I'm aware of (I've used Win32, Gtk, Qt, and Wx), and allows UI/UX designers so much more freedom and control over the entire application's look and feel.
Once upon a time the conventional wisdom was that users want all of their applications to look the same, and that in order to achieve consistency and make applications "user-friendly" they had to follow a rigid set of UI guidelines set forth by the OS and its one-and-only GUI toolkit. I think as the world moves increasingly towards the web this paradigm is slowly being left behind. There are some trends in web design that allow for some consistency in expected website behaviours while also allowing greater design flexibility as well. We expect navbars, menus, tables, dropdowns, settings pages, etc to all work in a certain way, and for the most part the average web user can find their way around pretty well.
I think putting a browser layout/rendering engine in a desktop app is actually a fairly natural bridge between the two worlds, at least until PWA's become fully supported at the OS level. I think the future will be full of thin web apps that behave like traditional desktop apps but use web technologies rather than the heavy GUI toolkits from yesterday. There is work to do in reducing the overhead. I think we'll see the actual browser engine abstracted into shared libraries or similar - we don't need a separate copy of chromium for every desktop app.
Software Engineer and full-time Rustacean. While Rust is my primary language, I am also fluent in Python and Typescript. I'm also currently making a game with Godot using C#.
I should mention that I have used Electron and found it visually great but otherwise bulky and slow. There is plenty of room to improve in this space.
I'm optimistic we'll see WebRender (Firefox's new rendering engine written in Rust) baked into a WASM-capable desktop app framework in the near future. One such project is Azul, which I'm not involved in but am watching with interest. Hopefully we'll see others as well.
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The one thing I like about putting a web browser in a desktop application is that HTML5/CSS is a very powerful language combo for designing layout and appearance. It is much more powerful and flexible than any GUI library I'm aware of (I've used Win32, Gtk, Qt, and Wx), and allows UI/UX designers so much more freedom and control over the entire application's look and feel.
Once upon a time the conventional wisdom was that users want all of their applications to look the same, and that in order to achieve consistency and make applications "user-friendly" they had to follow a rigid set of UI guidelines set forth by the OS and its one-and-only GUI toolkit. I think as the world moves increasingly towards the web this paradigm is slowly being left behind. There are some trends in web design that allow for some consistency in expected website behaviours while also allowing greater design flexibility as well. We expect navbars, menus, tables, dropdowns, settings pages, etc to all work in a certain way, and for the most part the average web user can find their way around pretty well.
I think putting a browser layout/rendering engine in a desktop app is actually a fairly natural bridge between the two worlds, at least until PWA's become fully supported at the OS level. I think the future will be full of thin web apps that behave like traditional desktop apps but use web technologies rather than the heavy GUI toolkits from yesterday. There is work to do in reducing the overhead. I think we'll see the actual browser engine abstracted into shared libraries or similar - we don't need a separate copy of chromium for every desktop app.
I should mention that I have used Electron and found it visually great but otherwise bulky and slow. There is plenty of room to improve in this space.
I'm optimistic we'll see WebRender (Firefox's new rendering engine written in Rust) baked into a WASM-capable desktop app framework in the near future. One such project is Azul, which I'm not involved in but am watching with interest. Hopefully we'll see others as well.