The Electron framework and portable software

[webfork]

The whole Electron framework has been discussed more than once on the site (including WebTorrent, Curse, and Wire) and, while it's not portable, it has enabled a lot of web services to come to the desktop. Obviously this doesn't impact us yet, but if the Electron framework were encouraged to go a more portable route, that would be a quick and smooth way to get a lot of programs quickly added to the portable catalog in a way that's (potentially) cross-platform.

It may even be possible to pull them together into one similar to Ninite or PortableApps as the (non-free) WebCatalog program has done:

https://getwebcatalog.com/downloads/windows
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/O ... alog.shtml

A tool like this that includes program isolation might also be capable of corralling a lot of errant files and settings.

Normally I'd consider taking this on as a separate project to try and see what I could manage, but as it stands it's been hard to dedicate the time I'd like to existing projects so, I thought I'd see if this grabbed someone's attention.

[Midas]

Case in point (following recent debates like the one at viewtopic.php?t=24294, am already donning my reproach helmet):

A developer by the name of Felix Rieseberg has resurrected Microsoft’s ancient OS using the power of Electron, a cross-platform app development framework.

"I put Windows 95 into an Electron app that now runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux. It’s a terrible idea that works shockingly well. I’m so sorry", he writes on Twitter.

@ www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/08/windows-95-electron-app

Some interesting technical details in that article. Now if someone did the same with Windows 98 SE, as this VMs apparently run fine in Linux and MacOS and given adequate performance, it might become a worthy platform for playing legacy games.

Electron Windows 95 download available from https://github.com/felixrieseberg/windows95 (also at www.freewarefiles.com/Windows-95-_program_112416.html and betanews.com/2018/08/23/run-windows-95-on-windows-macos-and-linux/).

[webfork]

I'm so sorry

I love it when people participate in a terrible project and acknowledge it from the start. It's like all those programs that start with "Yet Another <Program>".

I do hope he both disabled network connections by default and make it annoying to enable. Versions of Windows before probably Vista just do not need to be connected to the Internet.

Strangely this might be good for PFW as we still have a fair number of programs that work on older Windows versions and (mostly) don't require a net connection.

[webfork]

A few updates on this:

• Smaragdus' concerns over in the Mark Text thread.
• "Software disenchantment" - a great article on exceedingly inefficient software
  

  "Look around: our portable computers are thousands of times more powerful than the ones that brought man to the moon. Yet every other webpage struggles to maintain a smooth 60fps scroll on the latest top-of-the-line MacBook Pro. I can comfortably play games, watch 4K videos but not scroll web pages? How is it ok?" http://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/

[SYSTEM]

Software disenchantment" - a great article on exceedingly inefficient software

Thanks, nice read.

[TP109]

• "Software disenchantment" - a great article on exceedingly inefficient software

Good article. Totally agree with the author.

[Midas]

This...

Our portable computers are thousands of times more powerful than the ones that brought man to the moon. Yet every other webpage struggles to maintain a smooth 60fps scroll on the latest top-of-the-line MacBook Pro. I can comfortably play games, watch 4K videos but not scroll web pages? How is it ok?

Windows 10 takes 30 minutes to update. What could it possibly be doing for that long? That much time is enough to fully format my SSD drive, download a fresh build and install it like 5 times in a row.

Modern text editors have higher latency than 42-year-old Emacs. Text editors! What can be simpler?

As a general trend, we’re not getting faster software with more features. We’re getting faster hardware that runs slower software with the same features.

@ http://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/

Prepare to be dumbstruck if you dig deeper:

• I Peeked Into My Node_Modules Directory And You Won’t Believe What Happened Next
  https://medium.com/p/b89f63d21558

Dig even deeper and jump-switch into outright fear:

• Franken-algorithms: the deadly consequences of unpredictable code
  https://gu.com/p/96z42

development bloat glut

[Midas]

Practical case to highlight what we're talking about here: Arora browser (first mentioned by SimonT at viewtopic.php?p=19027#p19027).

Why can't a browser look and feel this lightweight? (Granted that memory footprint is for a single window/page with nothing on it...)







Sadly, Arora hasn't been updated since 2010 -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arora_(web_browser)...

[Specular]

Practical case to highlight what we're talking about here: Arora browser (first mentioned by SimonT at viewtopic.php?p=19027#p19027).

Why can't a browser look and feel this lightweight? (Granted that memory footprint is for a single window/page with nothing on it...)

Sadly, Arora hasn't been updated since 2010 -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arora_(web_browser)...

Arora and Aurora seem to be two different programs. The former is the one from 2010 (and with the Wiki page) while the latter from the results is new and mostly unheard of, however virtually all image results I'm seeing titles of suggest it's malicious. Not sure what your experience has been.

[Midas]

Well, it kinda puzzled me why it was named one way and displayed another, but I couldn't put my finger on it until you called it out. No ill effects whatsoever up to now, but I'll just recheck everything.

Meanwhile, it impressed me by how quickly it fires up, how nimble it feels when opening any page and the minute footprint.

----- EDIT ---

After further checking and although I couldn't detect anything malicious about the copy of Aurora Browser Portable that I have, I probably shouldn't have posted such a glowing recommendation.

Not much info around. The homepage is gone, but this summary still exists:

http://aurora-browser.findmysoft.com/

Virustotal is flagging the executable with a 9/68 (~13%) score:

www.virustotal.com /#/file/0917ef9f3825a4f4c9f58212b02ac10520876c4f4f15418442126d295eebc2c8/

The Hao123 (the name of a Chinese software download site, apparently) riskware is not severe enough to warrant an entry into most malware resources -- e.g., see TrendMicro's encyclopedia:

www.trendmicro.com /vinfo/tr/threat-encyclopedia/malware/pua_hao.ga

All in all, I believe the issue is due more to some fishy deployments of the single executable Aurora (coupled with the fact that it originates from China...) than it being unsavory by itself. YMMV, though.

[Midas]

Quick note about this debate on Ghacks.net comments about the pros and cons of Electron:

www.ghacks.net /2019/10/27/switch-is-a-cross-platform-open-source-application-launcher/

[Midas]

Not to beat a proverbial dead horse, but we now have Electron programs galore and words of warning are forever becoming -- this lengthy quote was taken from a rather insightful article on modern web development (highlights are mine).

Let’s try desktop versions of the applications we need, like Postman, this tool made to test endpoints.

[Image caption: Postman for desktop -- wait, create an account?]

If you smell web in this desktop application, you’re not wrong. Postman is written using Electron, meaning it has a full Chromium browser embedded, including DevTools, libffmpeg, etc. And… Surprise! It’s written in React.

[Image caption: Why keep it simple if they can overcomplicate?]

Yes, your desktop application is in reality a browser accessing React code that depends on countless packages just to generate mundane HTML. So what’s the price for all that? Well, for Linux version 11.3.2, there are 22,000 files taking 410 MB of space storage and more than 700 MB of RAM to load the offending initial screen. They want us to believe that the newest curl 8.8.0 for Linux, while more powerful and having only 3 files taking 1 MB of space storage combined and consuming just 10 MB of RAM, is this light because it has no UI. Sure, sure…

[Image caption: Postman needs over 25 MB of minified JavaScript code just to show a login screen no one asked for]

This Electron nightmare is everywhere, including many popular desktop applications such as Discord, Dropbox, GitHub, Microsoft Teams, Spotify, Visual Studio Code, WhatsApp, etc. They all behave similarly to Postman. And in the mobile realm, this gets even more common because most software companies don’t want to invest money in a different application for each platform. So if a mobile app has also a web version, chances are they are written using some sluggish JavaScript framework with an embedded browser.

[...] Browsers nowadays are huge monsters that have almost the same amount of lines of code as the Linux kernel. It’s stupid to the point I feel embarrassed just to write this down.

The only realm untouched by JavaScript is then the operating system, right? Not exactly. On Linux, the most popular graphical environment, GNOME, has 50% of its shell code written in JavaScript, and third-party extensions for GNOME have to be written entirely in JavaScript.

@ https://medium.com/p/71c459df6e62#5752

[Midas]

Another interesting quote...

In 1997, Id software released Quake 2, a 3D-accelerated game that was capable of delivering 60 frames per second on machines from that time. This means that every 16 ms the engine had to process hundreds of polygons, textures, dynamic lights, AI, physics, animations, multi device input, multi-channel audio, I/O, network synchronization, HUD, etc, etc. We are talking about an application that is miles and miles ahead in terms of complexity than the vast majority of web applications we see nowadays.

@ https://medium.com/p/71c459df6e62#e856

FYI, the full Quake II source code -- freely available from https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-2 -- compresses (without graphic assets, I presume) into a 1.44MB ZIP archive, the capacity of the then current storage media, i.e., something called a floppy-disk.

[Andrew Lee]

Not to beat a proverbial dead horse, but we now have Electron programs galore and words of warning are forever becoming -- this lengthy quote was taken from a rather insightful article on modern web development (highlights are mine).

I am drawn to these articles like people drawn to scenes of horrid traffic accidents; horrified, yet unable to move my gaze away from the mess

Fascinating read (plus all the other links within the writeup). Our software is such a sad, convoluted and brittle ball of yarn.

[Midas]

I am drawn to these articles...

Likewise, likewise -- my very poor coding skills notwithstanding...

Our software is such a sad, convoluted and brittle ball of yarn.

True that. And Windows has been a major contributor in its unrelenting race to become the OS from hell, spawning upon Earth to endelessly torture its hapless users. The Crowdstrike debacle is just the latest case in point, IMHO.