isabella232 / electrino

Desktop runtime for apps built on web technologies, using the system's own web browser engine

electrino

An experimental desktop runtime for apps built on web technologies, using the system's own web browser engine. The project is still young and accepting contributions.

Electrino aims to be a featherweight alternative to the popular and powerful Electron. It implements a minuscule portion of the APIs available in Electron, but the output app size is much smaller.

A "Hello World" app takes 115 MB using Electron, but only 167 kB using Electrino:

Read more about Electrino in this post on DailyJS

Comparison

Feature	Electron	Electrino
Comprehensive API	Yes	No
Small output size	No	Yes
Cross-platform support	Yes	Limited to macOS and Windows 10 at this time

Contribute

• Integrate WebView
• Support require() calls
• Add Node.js backend

API

Electrino currently supports the following API implementations:

• app
• BrowserWindow
• ipcMain
• Tray
• nativeImage

Roadmap

The plan is to examine API usage of real-world apps that use Electron but don't really need the full capabilities. Good candidates are desktop utilities, menu bar apps and other small apps that users typically leave open. (For large productivity-style apps, Electron is a better choice.)

Jan Hovancik offered his Stretchly app as a candidate, so I'm going to start by mapping out the APIs used by Stretchly and see what it would take to implement it with Electrino.

If you have a small Electron-based Mac app and you'd like to try putting it on an Electrino diet, let's give it a try! My contact info is below.

Contact

• Pauli Olavi Ojala / @pauliooj / pauli @ lacquer.fi
• Amila Welihinda / @amilajack / amilajack @ gmail.com