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Alternatives

Products that do what MōBrowser, a TypeScript-first desktop app framework with typed IPC does

Hi HN, For the last ~15 years I've worked on embedding web browsers into Java and .NET desktop apps (JxBrowser, DotNetBrowser). Over time, I watched many teams move from embedding web views into native apps, to building full desktop apps with frameworks like Electron and Tauri. Both are useful, but in practice I kept running into several problems. With Electron, beyond the larger app footprint, I often ran into: - lack of type-safe IPC - no source code protection - weak support for the modern web stack Tauri solves some problems (like app size), but introduces others: - different WebViews…

  1. 1IR

    A year ago, my co-founder launched Desktop Docs here on HN. It's a Mac app we built with Electron that uses CLIP embeddings to search photos and videos locally with natural language. We got positive feedback from HN and our first paying customers, but the app was almost 1GB and clunky to use. TLDR; rebuilding in Rust was the right move. So we rewrote the app with Rust and Tauri and here are the results: - App size is 83% smaller: 1GB → 172MB - DMG Installer is 70% smaller: 232MB → 69.5MB - Indexing files is faster: A 38-minute video now indexes in ~3 minutes instead of 10-14 minutes -…

    2025 · desktopdocs.com

  2. 2SN
  3. 3IW

    https://lisagui.com/info.html This is a web OS I wrote in vanilla JS that looks like the Apple Lisa Office System (1983-85), with other contemporaneous influences and additional improvements and features. It's currently in alpha and isn't remotely bug free. I had been holding off on posting this here until it was somewhat presentable and useful. Please note; the Lisa conforms more literally to the desktop metaphor than most modern GUIs - some of the important differences are mentioned in the readme. This is a complete recreation of the UI in JS; it all renders to a single…

    2025 · alpha.lisagui.com

  4. 4IC

    Hi, I'm a developer and first time i shipped the real product after observing the startups and indie hackers community for years. I had made so many useless apps [you should check my website https://ansh.life], but this time I built a very useful product that has a number of super easy-to-use tools in one app for video, music, and photo files. Users can compress, convert, resize, and do so much more with easy-to-use tools. Background: I developed a frame-by-frame video cropper to upload cropped landscape videos to Instagram Reels. However, it required FFmpeg, and as a noob video…

    2025 · pimosa.app

  5. 5
    Tauri214

    An Electron alternative written in Rust

    2022

  6. 6DL
  7. 7NO

    Hello HN! The day has finally come to stop adding features and start sharing what I've been building the last 5-6 months. It's a bit of CrewAI, OpenDevon, LangFuse/Cloud all in one, providing devs who prefer TypeScript an integrated framework thats provides a lot out of the box to start experimenting and building agents with. It started after peeking at the LangChain docs a few times and never liking the example code. I began experimenting with automating a simple Jira request from the engineering team to add an index to one of our Google Spanner databases (for context I'm the…

    2024 · github.com

  8. 8RO

    Claude’s desktop app is brilliant, but for our own daily work we kept wanting it to be less like a chat app and more like a full-fledged work app. Rowboat is our attempt at that, including the ability to build your own work surfaces inside Rowboat (more below). Our repo is https://github.com/rowboatlabs/rowboat, and there’s a demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et5yQABJ3xI In a previous startup, we built a deep-learning product for enterprise support reps, including teams supporting P&G brands. Models took live notes, suggested replies, and…

    Jul 2026 · github.com

  9. 9
    NW.js77

    A new way of writing desktop apps with Web technologies

    2015

  10. 10NA

    2013 · arc.io

  11. 11PE

    Inspired by Compiler Explorer and other playground/fiddle websites like jsfiddle, db-fiddle, Go playground, and Rust playground, I thought it would be cool to have a playground for nearly any program so I've been working on Program Explorer: a playground for running programs from containers. I am inspired by these playgrounds because they are great educational tools for quickly experimenting and as communication tools by sharing shortlinks that reproduce bugs for instance. I would love for every open source project that publishes a container to get their own playground for free. I'm…

    2025 · programexplorer.org

  12. 12

    An easier way to create mobile apps

    2014

  13. 13MN

    Hi HN, I've been building Mystral Native — a lightweight native runtime that lets you write games in JavaScript/TypeScript using standard Web APIs (WebGPU, Canvas 2D, Web Audio, fetch) and run them as standalone desktop apps. Think "Electron for games" but without Chromium. Or a JS runtime like Node, Deno, or Bun but optimized for WebGPU (and bundling a window / event system using SDL3). Why: I originally started by starting a new game engine in WebGPU, and I loved the iteration loop of writing Typescript & instantly seeing the changes in the browser with hot reloading. After…

    Jan 2026 · github.com

  14. 14
    App.js100

    library for creating mobile webapps behave like native apps

    2014

  15. 15AS

    This is a simple Pastebin clone I made using the Deno Typescript runtime. I created a simple templating system, and implemented server-side rendering for the UI. Demo: https://paste.jlcarveth.dev/

    2023 · github.com

  16. 16AJ

    I've been building a web UI library for a side project of mine. I thought it might be useful to others, so I'm releasing it as open source. To put it simply, I realized that most of my pain points with React come from its declarative model ui=f(state). So I'm trying something that I'm calling "imperative JSX." Instead of treating JSX as the source of truth for your UI, it essentially becomes a query interface for DOM manipulation. I first had the idea for it a few months ago, and only began writing it in earnest last week, so it's extremely early and nowhere near production-ready. Still, I'd…

    2024 · npmjs.com

  17. 17LA

    Initially I started building this for my own projects. The main goal was to define a unified "blueprint" allowing me to develop multi-platform apps using the same code, without code generation. I wanted to be able to develop the same functionality on web, desktop, cli, server, mobile, whatever... I've been able to achieve this by relying on TypeScript, a 4-layer architecture (UseCase => App => Product => Target) and dependency injection. This mechanism allows me to use whatever tech stack I want, provided the good adapters are developed. For instance, I have pre-built ones : node express…

    2025 · github.com

  18. 18
    Taurify32

    native apps for desktop and mobile - fast, good & easy

    2025

  19. 19WN
  20. 20TL

    Today we launched a Typescript library for building video processing applications that can run completely client-side This project has been started in March 2023 with the mission of creating the "video processing toolkit for the area of AI". During an extensive research period, we quickly decided to fully embrace WebGPU, which offers a substantial performance improvement over its predecessor WebGL and technologies alike. In combination with WebCodecs, these two technologies lead to unprecedented rendering capabilities on the web and pave the way for the next generation of video processing…

    2024 · github.com

  21. 21

    A new ready-to-use JS-based Gantt project management library

    Oct 2025

  22. 22IR

    I built Morph, an experimental fullstack HTML-first library for Deno, Node, and Bun. Everything returns HTML, not JSON. No React, no Vite — just plain HTML with server-side rendering. No build steps, no preprocessors, no complex configs — everything runs from a single file. Perfect for Telegram Web Apps, internal tools, simple admin panels, dashboards, or anywhere a full-blown SPA feels like overkill. Important: I built this entirely for myself — to solve my own problems. I hate complex frontend. I hate writing it. And I don’t want to waste time on it. But maybe it’ll help you too.

    2025 · github.com

  23. 23TT

    Hello, we're the Treenix team. We're building typed low-code runtime where humans and agents collaborate to build applications and workflows. Write a simple TypeScript class with methods, and Treenix automatically delivers admin interface, storage, API and MCP, access rules, UI form and audit trail. Views in Treenix are reactive, data-bound, and synced across all clients. They also support display contexts: data can render differently depending on the situation — a table in one place, a list in another. You can register multiple Views for the same data type, and the view engine picks the…

    Jun 2026 · github.com

  24. 24AC

    Beta Soon Follow me on X @cp_lepage and @get_fullstacked

    2024 · twitter.com

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