Title should maybe specify that this is a blogpost from the author reflecting over the project. There’s better link to showcase the actual project
https://blackboard.sh/electrobun/docs
Looks very promising, will be building my next project with it. Full TS stack is where I'm most productive. I'm glad we now have a more performant and lean alternative to Electron while not needing to deal with Rust and long compilation steps.
Are many games built with Electron ...? I know there are a few HTML5 games, crosscode was the first one I recall seeing that really pushed it. Aren't most small games Unity or Godot?
I do a lot of web development, and even if we set the great tooling aside for a moment, Bun is still a major improvement (a real leap, I’d say) when it comes to performance.
@OP I know it's "just" a webview at the end of the day but I still think the Electrobun website could use a screenshot or two. (Or maybe e.g. a short video of an app comparing the startup times of Electrobun, Tauri, Electron etc.)
One of the main problems I see with tauri is that system web views just aren’t a great solution for a ui framework. Partly because Linux doesn’t have an official webview implementation, partly because the web views across OS versions have differences (eg. Tauri on Linux had a benchmark saying the boot time was 20+ seconds because of the webview, and win 7 and I think even early versions of win 10 do not use the edge webview).
This is a lot of tradeoffs for saving 100 megs.
I understand that we should be good stewards of our customers’ hardware and not waste things unnecessarily, but also have to balance that with shipping something and not worrying about all the edge cases. Most people in developed countries have Internet connections of 100+ mbps, which means the app will still download in <10 seconds.
Does electrobun support using an embedded chromium for the renderer? I went to the project readme and it was really unclear if that’s a currently-supported option and if so, how to use it.
Why don't any of the major distros have a webview? Seems an obvious move if you want apps and alongside user experience, apps are the biggest barrier to linux adoption
There may not be an official webview, but all (?) major distributions have libwebkit2gtk, which is used by Wails (Go) and Tauri (rust). So it's a de facto standard if not official.
My hope is this still acts like a library that multiple Tauri instances share. That would still have the upside of Tauri's shared library architecture (boo statically compiled programs, what a waste of precious ram!) while still letting us have a viable runtime. First app load might not be lightning fast but second app load is hopefully faster!! The OS webviews range from mediocre to absolute garbage; this to me would be a great improvement, that makes me happy!
/* Looked at the product for which Electrobun was built, co(lab). «Focus on building instead of managing tools. Keep your code, browser, terminal, notes, and git workflow in one unified interface.» Well, a great idea! This is what Emacs mostly gives me. */
Moved from the molasses of VSCode to Rust-based Zed, no comparison. The second is snappy, responsive, uses much less memory (I can have 5 Zed open at the same time, no problems), not looking back.
I'm wondering about security for this sort of thing. I guess it's like node.js in the sense that while you could load JavaScript code downloaded from the Internet at runtime, you probably shouldn't? Any additional gotchas due to the web view?
If someone from Electrobun is reading this. Can Electrobun compile to android as well. I want to create a simple application which can take some index.html and pass an adblocker and create an app out of it since I think this idea is pretty cool.
I ended up having to use Ionic to create a html <-> Android app thing within github actions but Ionic doesn't support ad blocking abilities.
I'm going to production with a new Electron app at my job this week, i wish this had existed a year ago lol. Electron Builder does a pretty good job making the updates and signatures not TOO painful but it hasn't been painless by any stretch.
Looks cool, I'll try this for my next personal desktop project and see how it goes
I think it's going to eat a piece of the Electron pie for Steam indie games.
Most stay with bun after seeing how fast and seamless it is to run typescript games with instant auto reload:
bun --watch game.ts
I think the most famous Electron game is Vampire Suvivors, but it has since been ported to Unity.
This is a lot of tradeoffs for saving 100 megs.
I understand that we should be good stewards of our customers’ hardware and not waste things unnecessarily, but also have to balance that with shipping something and not worrying about all the edge cases. Most people in developed countries have Internet connections of 100+ mbps, which means the app will still download in <10 seconds.
Does electrobun support using an embedded chromium for the renderer? I went to the project readme and it was really unclear if that’s a currently-supported option and if so, how to use it.
Electrobun sounds really cool, glad to see there's more work done to enable cool desktop apps without Electron.
https://webkitgtk.org/
https://wails.io/docs/gettingstarted/installation/
https://v2.tauri.app/start/prerequisites/
Taken from the product site (not this blog post) that was linked by another user. So you get to choose it would seem.
My hope is this still acts like a library that multiple Tauri instances share. That would still have the upside of Tauri's shared library architecture (boo statically compiled programs, what a waste of precious ram!) while still letting us have a viable runtime. First app load might not be lightning fast but second app load is hopefully faster!! The OS webviews range from mediocre to absolute garbage; this to me would be a great improvement, that makes me happy!
[1]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/21237
https://blackboard.sh/electrobun/docs/
It certainly looks clean enough, and I'm more familiar with zig than rust, so I might give it a shot.
I ended up having to use Ionic to create a html <-> Android app thing within github actions but Ionic doesn't support ad blocking abilities.
Looks cool, I'll try this for my next personal desktop project and see how it goes