Every operating system contributed to the bloat. Windows has Win32, OS X has Carbon / Cocoa, Linux has X11 and various widget libs that sit on top of it. So it has been a perennial nut to crack to make cross platform widgets - wxWidgets, QT, SWT/JWT/Swing on Java, XMLShell (Firefox), Electron, GTK/GTK#, winelib etc.
Throw mobile platforms into the mix and it’s an unholy mess. Lowest common denominator is HTML and so the likes of Electron “wins” even though it’s bloated and slow.
i actually don’t have a problem with HTML, i just think that instead of every app shipping their own copy of electron, the operating system should provide basic browser functionality.
Linux and Mac use WebkitGTK, Windows uses Edge/Chromium, Android uses Chrome - as bundled in the respective OS, and you essentially have a frontend running on that webview communicating with a backend running locally via some special IPC protocol
Every operating system contributed to the bloat. Windows has Win32, OS X has Carbon / Cocoa, Linux has X11 and various widget libs that sit on top of it. So it has been a perennial nut to crack to make cross platform widgets - wxWidgets, QT, SWT/JWT/Swing on Java, XMLShell (Firefox), Electron, GTK/GTK#, winelib etc.
Throw mobile platforms into the mix and it’s an unholy mess. Lowest common denominator is HTML and so the likes of Electron “wins” even though it’s bloated and slow.
i actually don’t have a problem with HTML, i just think that instead of every app shipping their own copy of electron, the operating system should provide basic browser functionality.
that sounds like Tauri!
Linux and Mac use WebkitGTK, Windows uses Edge/Chromium, Android uses Chrome - as bundled in the respective OS, and you essentially have a frontend running on that webview communicating with a backend running locally via some special IPC protocol
Microsoft got literally sued and almost dissolved as a company for that
But that’s cause it wasn’t FOSS, but instead a privately owned closed-source app
If an open standard was set, and agreed upon by most, then nobody would sue anyone
Heck, many Linux distros come with a browser preinstalled, but use a FOSS one to not hit that legal problem
Yeah, 1998 was definitely a time where Microsoft wasn’t going to do that. They were (and are) in embrace, extend, extinguish mode
If anything they’ve ramped up on the EEE mode
AzurEEE
And what did we get for it? If you search “chrome install” in Edge it pulls a Janet, all like
To be fair… Chrome is a lateral move on Windows. If I were forced to use Windows I’d probably just use edge if I needed a chromium browser lol
Then that operating system gets hit with anti-trust
Not if it’s FOSS
not if it’s a library