Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Microsoft invented Electron, when Windows Active Desktop came to be.

Mozzilla also invented Electron, when XUL applications were a thing.

Both failed, as shipping regular processes with the default browser kept being used.



KDE invented Electron, when they built KHTML as independently embeddable HTML + CSS + JS engine.

Mozilla did it with Gecko even earlier, really — but they gave up on it to focus on browser itself. (There were a number of Gecko-based browsers like GNOME default browser Epiphany using it)

Apple built WebKit on top of KHTML just as Gecko stopped being updated: I guess they invented it too.

Tools like Windmill (web rendering automation for testing) took programmable concept further.

And Sun did very similar things with Java applets and Java applet runtime for desktop.


I don't think KDE ever used KHTML as an app development platform rather than as a plugin for rich text.


I only offered that in jest: an embeddable rendering engine is really what WebKit + v8 was, and Electron was just a packaging system for it.

There were previous attempts at making cross platform apps for the web and for the desktop.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: