Electron is an unholy fusion of Chromium and Node.JS. Nothing more, nothing less. It doesn’t ‘just happen’ to use HTML and CSS. It’s literally just a browser with most of the default browser UI being hidden. Something like React Native would better fit your definition.
I’m on my lunch break from working on a React Native codebase, and I wouldn’t say RN fits that definition at all… but I think we’re just getting lost in semantics.
My point was just that a web app running inside a browser has to abide by the rules and limitations set by the browser, whereas Electron flips that relationship – your app sets the rules and limitations of what can be done, and the web rendering process abides by whatever environment you create. You can do anything the OS permits. Even from inside a web context, if you want. You don’t need a browser-managed sandbox to mediate your interactions with the OS.
It’s not literally just a browser. It’s literally just a web engine with a full set of OS calls hooked in. It is not a browser in the same way GNOME is not an OS. A browser comes with a whole lot more than a web engine, so calling it “a browser” is wrong both technically and colloquially.
Electron is a framework for building desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. By embedding Chromium and Node.js into its binary, Electron allows you to maintain one JavaScript codebase and create cross-platform apps that work on Windows, macOS, and Linux — no native development experience required.
Electron is so much more than “just a web engine with a full set of OS xalls hooked in”. Ultralight and Sciter are frameworks that actually just happen to use HTML, CSS and JavaScript for UI development. They aren’t fully-fledged web browsers without a search box, they are tailor-made for app development.
Yea, that was less ideal word choice by me. The point is that part is ONLY an html/css engine, not a sandbox and web api implementation plus tons of extras and plugins like a browser.
Very, VERY different animals, even if it used the exact same rendering engines as a browser.
