Alternatives to node webkit? (filesize of importance)

node.js cross-browser webkit node-webkit
user429620 picture user429620 · Mar 7, 2014 · Viewed 24.6k times · Source

Whilst node-webkit is nice, the binaries on mac and linux are over 70MB for a hello world application. Unacceptable.

Is there any cross platform library available that simply uses the system default browser? I don't really care if that's IE, or webkit, or ... ? I presume that way the binary would be much smaller.

Or is there any cross-platform language that can easily integrate a (system) browser view?

Thanks.

Answer

Angular University picture Angular University · Mar 12, 2014

There is AppJs, but I don't think it could occupy much less space.

In all cases, a runtime similar to node-webkit is always going to take up some space because it needs to include a webkit rendering engine and a Javascript engine at least, and those are large applications.

node-webkit can be shared across several node-webkit applications, so it's not needed to install 70MB each time, have a look at this documentation for further details:

enter image description here

The size of node-webkit is actually quite reasonable compared to other runtimes such as the JVM which takes up several hundreds megabytes, and 70MB as disk size of nowadays is small (as a comparison it's the size of 10/20 pictures).

Concerning one of your questions, node-webkit cannot reuse the already installed Chrome because it's based on Chromium which is a different browser.

Also there is no way for it to tap into or reuse existing webkit engines in already installed browsers, because versions might be different, security reasons, etc.

Also the webkit in node-webkit is modified to for example allow the user to access the file system, open database connections and all the expected functionality of a non browser based desktop application, so that's another reason why reusing installed browsers is not possible.

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