Sciter Reviews and Details

Is Sciter good?

Social recommendations and mentions

• Tauri

  That's what Sciter does - https://sciter.com/ - it just gives you a lightweight HTML / CSS / Javascript "webview" engine. Like you pointed out, that shoudl be enough. But corporates want a "webview" that is an OS so that they can do everything with Javascript on it (hence why embedded Chrome with NodeJS is so popular). - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago

• When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

  If I was to spend a trillion tokens on a barely working browser I would have started with the source code of Sciter [0] instead. I really like the premise of an electron alternative that compiles to a 5MB binary, with a custom data store based on DyBASE [1] built into the front end javascript so you can just persist any object you create. I was ready to build software on top of it but couldn't get the basic... - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago

• Show HN: Vaev – A browser engine built from scratch (It renders google.com)

  There is also https://sciter.com/ that the author tried to find finance to make it opensource but couldn't find enough supporters. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

• Servo in 2024: stats, features and donations

  > I'm convinced that using an embedded browser engine to render app UI is the future. Sciter exists: https://sciter.com/ And it indeed is great for UI. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

• Blitz: A lightweight, modular, extensible web renderer

  I think Sciter is probably the better comparison: https://sciter.com/ It is a ground-up implementation of HTML and CSS rendering. IIRC it used to have its own programming language but now uses JS. I’ve long been interested in this kind of thing but haven’t actually played with Sciter in depth. Used to be that the licensing was a concern but looking at the site now it seems the terms have changed to be much more... - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago

• So You Want to Build a Browser Engine

  Seems a good place to mention https://sciter.com/ It's been on HN loads of times. A "browser" engine but very narrow scope. Works a treat for LOB type apps. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago

• Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or <canvas>

  > wondering if css and svg could be used as abstraction over graphics and UI libraries There's another project called Sciter that uses CSS to target native graphics libraries: https://sciter.com > I wonder how hard it was to implement css. I've heard it can be pretty complex. It was hard, but the biggest barrier is the obscurity of the knowledge. Text layout is the hardest, because working with glyphs and... - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago

• Bringing Back Horizontal Rules in HTML Select Elements

  [2] https://sciter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/select-variants.png. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago

• Immediate Mode GUI Programming

  Otherwise, if we have only retained mode as in browsers, we will need to modify the DOM heavily and create temporary elements for handles. [1] https://sciter.com. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago

• Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

  An embedded engine is also a much faster path to viable use cases. For example Sciter [1] has some degree of success despite implementing only a sane subset of the DOM API. It doesn't work well for general internet surfing, but when used as an UI library you just avoid the parts that don't work. 1: https://sciter.com/. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago

• Rusty revenant Servo returns to render once more

  I've still never used it but I've long been curious about Sciter: https://sciter.com. - Source: Hacker News / almost 3 years ago

• So you want to write a GUI framework (2021)

  These bullet points are exactly what I did in Sciter (https://sciter.com) - Windowing -- Tabs -- Menus -- Painting -- Animation -- Text -The compositor -Handling input -- Pointer input -- Keyboard input - Accessibility - Internationalization and localization - Cross-platform APIs - The web view - Native look and feel On top of that DOM and CSS implementations to achieve declarative UI. And JS as a languuage behind... - Source: Hacker News / about 3 years ago

• Servo, the parallel browser engine written in Rust

  I'm not sure if it can support all the libraries but yes it can be used to make desktop apps. Theres also Sciter. https://sciter.com/. - Source: Hacker News / about 3 years ago

• A list of rendering engines that are not Blink:

  There's also https://sciter.com/ if you don't give a damn about standards. Source: about 3 years ago

• Digital Audio Workstation Front End Development Struggles

  I agree web stuff is really the best way to develop UIs. Good luck making responsive stuff in C++ for example. The paradigm of HTML, CSS, and JS is extremely powerful and even allows you to use canvas, webgpu, wasm. There are multiple commercial projects that use web dev paradigm for GUIs: https://coherent-labs.com/ https://ultralig.ht/. - Source: Hacker News / about 3 years ago

• RePalm

  I did UI part of it. Up until last year my Sciter ( https://sciter.com ) worked on WinCE. Dropped support after my last customer that was using WinCE decided to drop support of that OS. WinCE had pretty solid and stable core runtime and API. Graphics was limited by GDI (no antialiasing and alpha channel) but that was the only major problem. - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago

• Perspective 2.0, Open Source WebAssembly-Powered BI

  Electron is going to kill the good performance gains of Perspective. Even if you have a fully beefed-up workstation, Electron is going to trigger the CPU fans. Electron is discouraged nowadays in favor of lightweight solutions like Sciter[0], Tauri[1] or even WebView2[2]. -- [0]: https://sciter.com/ [1]: https://tauri.app/ [2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/. - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago

• XUL Layout has been removed from Firefox

  It has its own HTML/CSS rendering engine that draws stuff using DirectX, Vulkan (Win/Lin) and Metal(MacOS). It is used in many (~500 mln installations) applications that are considered native. Like Norton and other antiviruses (https://sciter.com/#customers). - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago

• XUL Layout has been removed from Firefox

  Check my Sciter ( https://sciter.com ) It is embeddable HTML/CSS/JS/ UI layer by design. If you want to check how it feels in real life application then check https://notes.sciter.com/ . That's monolithic, portable executable (~7mb) that includes Sciter itself and HTML/CSS/JS/ resources of the application ( https://gitlab.com/c-smile/sciter.notes/-/tree/main/src/res ). - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago

• Tether elements to each other with CSS anchor positioning

  Popups (tooltips include) are shown as out-of-canvas elements - separate desktop windows, that's the must for desktop UI. Check this: https://terrainformatica.com/w3/sciter-tooltip.png So far these APIs appear as complete, I do not have other tooltip related requests last 5 or so years. [1] https://sciter.com. - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago

• Electron Fiddle: The easiest way to get started with Electron

  Chrome engine is build for browsing the web multiple windows multiple tabs etc. If you drive with a empty truck with trailer it uses more oil than a car. Chrome is not designed for this. There are other engines like https://sciter.com that are work for single apps, but probably scale bad if they are misused as a browser. - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago