When you just need to build a tiny desktop app: TinyJS

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As the world’s billionaires anxiously plot datacenters to run trillions of lines of AI-generated slop code, one software engineer has zagged in a completely different direction: building an ecosystem for writing and running small apps that run on desktop computers, like it was 1992 all over again.

The trick to TinyJS’s frugality is that it uses the WebView window of each OS, utilizing the built-in browser engine to visually render the app, rather than implementing a UI layer from scratch. It uses WebKit to run apps in this fashion on macOS, WebView2 for Windows, and WebKitGTK for Linux.

TinyJS’s approach is starkly different from using the Electron framework, which bundles a Chromium open source browser core with each desktop app. But whereas Electron promises an identical look-and-feel of an app across all platforms, TinyJS apps will have slight visual variances when run on the different platforms, owing to minor differences in how each OS’s rendering engine works.

Stroh-Spijer also simplified the development process by using the OS’ interprocess communication mechanisms for handling data transfer, eliminating the need to bundle an HTTP server for each app, along with all the security headaches that entails.

The Tauri project has a similar aim of creating the tiny apps, and can deliver a desktop app in 10MB, but that framework has some drawbacks, Stroh-Spijer noted on the TinyJS website. The main one is that you have to write applications in Rust – which requires learning Rust, among other drawbacks.