<story><title>Build Cross-Platform Applications for desktop using HTML, CSS, Javascript</title><url>http://appjs.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>GeneralMaximus</author><text>I&apos;m enamored with the idea of writing desktop applications with web technologies, but I&apos;m not enamored with the idea of running a node.js instance locally for every such desktop application.&lt;p&gt;What I would &lt;i&gt;like&lt;/i&gt; to see is a &quot;privileged mode&quot; Chromium (or Firefox) that would let applications break out of the browser sandbox and directly perform operations such as filesystem I/O. Privileged Mode Chromium would obviously be a huge security threat if it&apos;s allowed to run any old code, so it would be wise to prevent it from downloading and executing scripts over the network, or maybe have some kind of script signing support in place so that the only scripts allowed to execute are the ones with the app developers&apos; signature on them. Or maybe I&apos;m talking out of my ass here and what we have right now works just fine. Feel free to correct me here.&lt;p&gt;Also, one question. Isn&apos;t the node.js instance serving my application visible to other applications on the same system? Can&apos;t a malicious application take advantage of this fact and cause my app to misbehave?&lt;p&gt;(Offtopic: I must point out an irritating and potentially harmful design trend that is emerging as a result of Twitter Bootstrap&apos;s popularity: the top navigation bar that stays in place as you scroll downward. It wastes precious screen space, looks ugly and doesn&apos;t add anything of value to the website. Why is it so important that I be forced to look at your website&apos;s logo and navigation bar &lt;i&gt;all the time&lt;/i&gt;? I&apos;m not picking on the AppJS developers here; this is a general sentiment directed towards all the designers who embrace this terrible trend.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gliese1337</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    What I would like to see is a &quot;privileged mode&quot; Chromium
    (or Firefox) that would let applications break out of
    the browser sandbox and directly perform operations such
    as filesystem I/O.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
This is exactly what Microsoft HTML Applications do (available since IE 5). In other respects, I&apos;m not a big fan of Internet Explorer, but this is one thing I think it did amazingly right, and way before anybody else. I was very excited to see the headline, and then horribly disappointed to discover that what they&apos;re offering is Not As Good as 13-year-old Microsoft technology.</text></comment>
<story><title>Build Cross-Platform Applications for desktop using HTML, CSS, Javascript</title><url>http://appjs.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>GeneralMaximus</author><text>I&apos;m enamored with the idea of writing desktop applications with web technologies, but I&apos;m not enamored with the idea of running a node.js instance locally for every such desktop application.&lt;p&gt;What I would &lt;i&gt;like&lt;/i&gt; to see is a &quot;privileged mode&quot; Chromium (or Firefox) that would let applications break out of the browser sandbox and directly perform operations such as filesystem I/O. Privileged Mode Chromium would obviously be a huge security threat if it&apos;s allowed to run any old code, so it would be wise to prevent it from downloading and executing scripts over the network, or maybe have some kind of script signing support in place so that the only scripts allowed to execute are the ones with the app developers&apos; signature on them. Or maybe I&apos;m talking out of my ass here and what we have right now works just fine. Feel free to correct me here.&lt;p&gt;Also, one question. Isn&apos;t the node.js instance serving my application visible to other applications on the same system? Can&apos;t a malicious application take advantage of this fact and cause my app to misbehave?&lt;p&gt;(Offtopic: I must point out an irritating and potentially harmful design trend that is emerging as a result of Twitter Bootstrap&apos;s popularity: the top navigation bar that stays in place as you scroll downward. It wastes precious screen space, looks ugly and doesn&apos;t add anything of value to the website. Why is it so important that I be forced to look at your website&apos;s logo and navigation bar &lt;i&gt;all the time&lt;/i&gt;? I&apos;m not picking on the AppJS developers here; this is a general sentiment directed towards all the designers who embrace this terrible trend.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pmjordan</author><text>Mozilla and its successors, Firefox and Thunderbird are actually built on XUL[1], which is an XML-based UI description language which can be mixed with HTML and SVG, styled with CSS and programmed just like HTML with JavaScript. Then there&apos;s the xulrunner, which lets you write standalone apps on this tech. It&apos;s never taken off much, but I don&apos;t know if that&apos;s down to flaky implementation or just lack of interest. (if you don&apos;t like XUL, just use a minimal amount of it to embed your HTML app)&lt;p&gt;[1] I&apos;m not sure what the current status is, but I think they want to phase it out?</text></comment>