How suitable is electron-browser-shell for building products on?

[autonome]

Fantastic work, thanks for making this 🙏🏼

The readme has basic information about the code, but not much about the broader project, goals, funding, etc.

• Do you want companies to use this as a base for their products?

• What's the sustainability approach for the project? Donations, contributions-by-users, licensing fees, mix of those, other?

• What's the governance approach? Are you open to increased participation by projects depending on it as a base, and their participation in determining roadmap and features?

• What are your thoughts on support for multiple protocols vs HTTP only? cf Agregore and Peersky

• How malleable is the user interface approach? Are you interested in being the base for non-tabbed-browser approaches to building web user agents?

Thanks!

[samuelmaddock]

Apologies, this slipped through my notifications. Thanks for the kind words and questions!

• Do you want companies to use this as a base for their products?

The shell project serves two purposes primarily:

1. A test bed for extension support in Electron.
2. An example browser project using minimal third-party code.

I chose an MIT license for the packages/shell directory so anyone can fork it for their own projects. It's a fairly minimal implementation so I think it works well at least to get an idea of how to structure a browser application with Electron.

To answer your question, I don't mind if folks use it as a base.

• What's the sustainability approach for the project? Donations, contributions-by-users, licensing fees, mix of those, other?

The electron-chrome-extensions package has required by far the most effort up to this point. Easily hundreds of hours of work in this repo and upstream in Electron. Given the substantial effort required, I decided to try dual-licensing (GPLv3 & Patron) as a way to fund these efforts. It's helped to a certain degree in regards to motivation, but it's far from being able to pay my rent.

I wouldn't say it's sustainable as there are times where I lack the motivation to spend my nights and weekends in improving extension support. Each feature where a contribution upstream is needed can easily require 5-30 hours.

I'm not quite sure what it would take to make this project sustainable though. I feel like getting more folks to make an active effort in contributing to Electron for the purpose of extension support would go a long way.

• What's the governance approach? Are you open to increased participation by projects depending on it as a base, and their participation in determining roadmap and features?

There's currently no governance structure in place. If folks want to open PRs, I'm open to reviewing and working with them when the time permits.

• What are your thoughts on support for multiple protocols vs HTTP only? cf Agregore and Peersky

I'm a fan of @RangerMauve's work (Agregore) and would love to eventually see compatibility for extensions on non-standard protocols. However, I'll likely leave that work up to other contributors. Electron/Chromium probably needs a bit of patching to make extensions aware of those protocols. My email and DMs are open if folks need some direction on that.

• How malleable is the user interface approach? Are you interested in being the base for non-tabbed-browser approaches to building web user agents?

I don't think I'll be making any serious efforts to providing a stable base within /packages/shell. For folks building their own Electron-based browsers, I'd suggest hard forking this project if they're considering using it. The npm modules (electron-chrome-extensions, electron-chrome-web-store) follow semver in regards to any breaking changes.

[autonome]

Hi Sam, thanks for a clear and thorough reply! Most software has no kind of clarity around these questions, so I really appreciate you writing it up.