NeutralinoJS: The Next Best Alternative to Electron & Tauri
A few years back, the only way for web developers to enter into the Desktop app space was either Electron or NW.js. Both choices were not really choices at all — both were huge, full of bloat, memory hogging frameworks but the solution was tempting to many. Huge companies like Microsoft, Slack, Discord invested into it but there were still many people who did not want to install 9 different versions of Chromium to run 9 different apps.
NeutralinoJS was not a new idea — instead of packaging the whole Node + Chromium with every app, why not reuse the already installed browser each OS comes with? Linux & macOS have WebKit while Microsoft Windows has IE, Edge, and now Chromium. A fabulous idea in theory but complications like native support for system tray, notifications, file system access, data storage, and security made many hesitate into actually making it a thing.
Released in 2018 by a Sri Lankan programmer, Shalitha Suranga, NeutralinoJS was one of the first frameworks to properly support 3 different desktop platforms while making it extremely easy for web developers. 3 years later, it has its own Javascript client library, support for extensions, and a very minimal footprint (< 3 MB).
