See if you use Electron you have to bundle a whole Chromium instance
So it's 100+ MB
But if you use Qt it's a lot smaller, because every distro ships Qt
But none of them ship the Qt you need, so you do have to bundle Qt
So it's 100+ MB
@babble_endanger "we'll target WebEngine and ship 200MB"
@arrjay Honestly
You could probably ship a whole qemu VM running Windows 95 and get a better experience in fewer bytes
@babble_endanger achieving Linux portability by exclusively targeting MSVC6-era Windows
@arrjay You could also ship a local web UI.
It's the modern-day CLI - Something stupid that was never meant to do this, but which is pressed into service because everything else sucks even more donkey nads
@arrjay My brain might be about to shit out the best idea I've had in years. Will report back
@babble_endanger shipping an entire copy of Chrome because it's easier than dealing with CORS bullshit
@arrjay Yeah pretty much.
Also having to pick a known port and be a singleton mandates certain dev practices
Okay so here's my idea, I won't guard it jealously:
A compositor for local web UI apps.
That takes over the singleton duties. It allows you to have multiple UIs in one pane, or not. It lowers the bar to entry for certain apps (e.g. if you have a Wayland compositor, maybe it can let you present Wayland apps in a browser tab)
@arrjay And then for multi-instance apps (which many things _should_ be 🙄 ) it handles that correctly via (insert miracle here)
@babble_endanger this feels like a plan9-ism, but: https://tacobelllabs.net/@arrjay/117199372805504808
@arrjay actually that's CGI too innit
@babble_endanger embedding a web renderer in the terminal
some ANSI-escape code hell...
Sep 2, 2026, 4:11 AM@arrjay @babble_endanger I think that's been done before.
Sep 2, 2026, 4:27 AM@drwho @arrjay @babble_endanger $ cat page.html | Headless browser | PNG | timg
@arrjay "Oh but Babble," I say to myself, "How are you going to get OpenGL and video streaming to work in that model?"
I will shrimply NOT lol
Sep 2, 2026, 4:28 AM@babble_endanger @arrjay If you already have OpenGL, just do everything in IMGUI