Show HN: Native apps for the browser

http://arc.io/

by grun • 13 years ago

152 58 13 years ago

arc.io

jcarden• 13 years ago

Have any plans to support Linux or Windows ?

grun7• 13 years ago

Absolutely -- Arc is coming to Linux and Windows soon.

IanChiles• 13 years ago

Could you use Docker as a backend on Linux? I feel like it would eliminate a lot of the size overhead, and be significantly easier to ship (a single static binary)

samspenc• 13 years ago

Fantastic! If I can run Thunderbird in a browser, I'm ready to move to Chromebooks! :)

ep103• 13 years ago

Wait, is thunderbird under active development?

reidrac• 13 years ago

Thunderbird 24.0 was released in September: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/24.0/releasenotes/

I don't know if it is just in "maintenance mode", but it seems still alive.

withjive• 13 years ago

Unfortunately such a plugin as this would be of type NPAPI. Which Google has just announced that they are starting to deprecate and have stopped accepting submissions to the Chrome Web Store for NPAPI plugins.

So there's never going to be support for this to be able to run on a Chromebook.

joebo• 13 years ago

Have you considered qemu? Performance won't be as good, but the binary is considerably smaller and doesn't require admin to install.

grun7• 13 years ago

I chose VirtualBox over qemu for performance.

For size, Arc's installer will continue to shrink (it's down to 60MB from 140MB). A custom built VirtualBox should be quite small. However, VirtualBox does require admin to install while qemu does not.

In the future, Arc will be agnostic and support multiple hypervisors. One could use qemu, VirtualBox, HyperV on Windows, kvm on Linux, etc.

earlz• 13 years ago

I could've swore I had just seen this the other day. Oh wait I did[1]! And it's still only on Mac OSX and does not appear to have advanced in the past 2 months.

Well, ok, it has advanced some it appears and has significantly more/better documentation than it did.. but I'm still waiting for it to work on my Linux box :(

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6219354

Gonzih• 13 years ago

First I thought about Arc programming language and got really confused.

skrebbel3• 13 years ago

I feel like I'm missing something. If users have to download a 140MB, what, browser plugin? Is it a browser plugin? Then how does the "in the browser" argument hold up?

Sure, if this gets popular like Flash once got popular then it might work (and it might be the best thing since sliced bread, really), but as long as it doesn't, how is this different from just packaging ffmpeg into a plugin and having users install that? (to take the "Why" link's example case)

grun7• 13 years ago

The blog post is a little over a month old. The installer is 60MB now.

Arc is a daemon that runs on your system, like DropBox. Browsers can use arc.js and instruct Arc to run native code in lightweight Linux virtual machines.

Arc is a stronger approach than maintaining browser plugins. Arc apps, like web apps, are up-to-date every time they're opened. They also have full access to their Linux virtual machine and can use Linux programs as-is. Browser plugins can't provide that.

meowface• 13 years ago

It still sounds like a kind of browser plugin to me, but the "plugging in" is done at the OS level instead of within the browser + the OS (as with, say, Flash having an application component and a browser plugin component).

It really doesn't seem like a bad idea, though, so long as the sandboxing is done safely and securely.

skrebbel3• 13 years ago

Thanks for the explanation. Maybe make that part more apparent on the site. But how does the JS in the browser talk to Arc without a plugin?

Toenex• 13 years ago

I certainly think this is very neat but the bottom line is that a user would have to be able to install arc the first time they want to use an app built on it. No matter how trivial you make that process it still sits on the other-side of the 'all you need is a browser' argument. For a lot of folk the distinction is not important but for others its quite different. For example I work medical imaging where we deploy in tightly controlled hospital environments where I can guarantee a browser will be installed (increasingly not just IE). Getting anything else widely rolled out is simply beyond our $$ power and thus we wouldn't target a technology like arc (sadly as I can think of a couple of places it would help). It sucks but you really don't want to give potential customers any excuse to not bother trying the product.

Walkman3• 13 years ago

    $ open /Applications/Arc.app
    LSOpenURLsWithRole() failed with error -10810 for the file /Applications/Arc.app.

Walkman3• 13 years ago

Apparently it's started but nothing indicates that.

Walkman3• 13 years ago

Also it automatically respawns :O How do I kill that thing without restart?

grun7• 13 years ago

Gotcha!

Kidding. Arc is registered with launchd, Apple's daemon manager.

To halt Arc, unload it from launchd with

  launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.arc.arcd.plist

film42• 13 years ago

This is really cool, and I'm disappointed there's so much hate going on in here.

I agree with points that there is a distribution challenge, but I think if Arc can get small enough, it'll be like SilverLight or Flash. This could make a huge difference for in-browser games that don't want to mess with asm.js.

nonchalance• 13 years ago

@grun: you submitted this 49 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6219354). What has changed?

skrebbel3• 13 years ago

A front page.

I think this is a valid resubmission. Also, he submitted it before and got burnt down. Apparently (if you see the set of comments here right now), people's moods are better today.

grun7• 13 years ago

  - arc.io with documentation, demos, and examples in Python, C, Ruby, and Node.js.
  - Support for other developers to build and ship Arc apps.
  - Installer is 60MB, down from 140MB.
  - Updated to the latest VirtualBox v4.2.18.
  - Bug fixes, security fixes, and performance improvements.

49 days ago Arc was ready for a blog post. Now it's ready for laps around the track.

misuba• 13 years ago

We do need an open, documented alternative to PNaCl.

pjmlp4• 13 years ago

Desktop applications?

eliben2• 13 years ago

PNaCl is a liberally-licensed open source project. You can see its source code and compile it whenever you want. How much more open would you like it to be?

As for documented, good timing :) Just today the first bits of the preview documentation were released: https://developers.google.com/native-client/pnacl-preview/

shawn-butler2• 13 years ago

Native Client also supports the execution of nexe modules directly in the browser. However, since nexes contain architecture-specific machine code, they are not allowed to be distributed on the open web—they can only be used as part of applications and extensions that are installed from the Chrome Web Store.

camus• 13 years ago

"Native apps for the browser" = it's a lie since you basically need to download a third party software on your computer ( >60MB ) which runs as a daemon (sic),it's just yet another plugin. When that thing works without any 3rd party executable let me know.

aroch• 13 years ago

'daemon' in the quote is correct, both in context and in spelling. Not sure why you felt the need to add "sic".

songgao• 13 years ago

Great concept! Would be nice if it's an open standard. Instead of having to download and install your App, people can implement and choose from different implementations. This makes several things possible:

1. Different virtualization/container engine: Different platforms have different good stuff. I would use LXC/docker for Linux since it's super lightweight, and disposable. Even NaCl should be an option.

2. Standardizing would also help defining how resources should be allocated/re-used on local machines.

3. People who make web apps gets to use a single standard instead of tracking different technologies. (Think about Java Applet vs Flash vs Silverlight) Any site should be able to access it through a port on localhost. It's THE port, using THE protocol. And that's it; it should work on all hosts that have the service installed.

4. It brings a chance to have it accepted by major browsers makes as a core service, which makes it easier for wide adoption.

benbristow• 13 years ago

Looks nice, but if it's only Mac compatible it's not going to take off any time soon. Get the Win/Linux versions out ASAP.

quarterto• 13 years ago

Arc gives websites a Linux virtual machine on every client.

Nonononononononononononononononononononononononoo. No. No thanks. Nuh-uh.

a1a• 13 years ago

Feel free to provide your arguments.

pjmlp4• 13 years ago

Browser is for documents.

tokenizerrr• 13 years ago

Full access to my private network and excessive resource consumption are two things to come to mind

spoiler• 13 years ago

At the same time I feel both excited and a bit sceptical. This seems great because it opens a lot of possibilities.

But also has the potential to turn into another "Please download and install Adobe Flash player and refresh the page in order to view this content" thing.

It would be brilliant if browsers supported this natively (but then, I doubt IE ever would).

avodonosov• 13 years ago

Good project. The same way we can run Java Virtual Machine applications in browser, we could run Linux Virtual Machine applications.

tbirdz• 13 years ago

You might want to change the name from Arc to something else. Arc is the name of a lisp dialect written by Paul Graham, and is the language Hacker News is written in. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_%28programming_language%29

trvz• 13 years ago

It's a good name and shouldn't be changed. They're different enough things to be discriminable via context. Also, there's Automatic Reference Counting and people who don't care about proper casing ("Ios"). Lastly, if the matter gets out of hand, it's regrippable by adding the author's name in front of Arc: Paul's Arc, Grun's Arc, Noah's Arc.

mratzloff3• 13 years ago

Has anything else significant been written in Arc? @pg talked about the language for a long time before its release, but it seems to have stagnated since then.

chanux• 13 years ago

Just don't listen to naysayers. listen to all constructive criticism of course.

Kudos

eulerphi• 13 years ago

How is this different from XPCOM browser addon for Firefox? Why the heavy VM instead of just using C++ modules?

icebraining• 13 years ago

Platform-independence is a big advantage. XPCOM forces you to write and test for each platform you want to support.

gprasanth• 13 years ago

sup

niels_bom• 13 years ago

How about iOS, Android, WinPho? Mobile web use _is_ on the rise you know ;-)

Would it be possible to run those virtual machines there as well?

tomw1808• 13 years ago

I see there are some pro's like we have it somehow with Java today. Maybe we can really start an environment which suits for all browsers to run a piece of code in it, which is cross plattform compatible and makes use of all the great possibilities that we have on a linux machine. Great there!

Now the con's: With great possibilities come great responsibilities. Where do you want to start to avoid having a super-amount of unsecure boxes? Package a ready-to-use program into the box with a "just one click in your browser to start"-button, having users who run code they never look at, from people they never saw (but for some weird reasons trust), in boxes they just one-click-download-and-run? Or did I just got something wrong?

argvzero• 13 years ago

so this thing downloads arbitrary binaries with no verification and makes them executable on my local machine?

cool story bro. probably some cool hacks in here but no one is going to use this.

tharshan09• 13 years ago

I got an error on OSX when trying to install the package. Where do I submit bug reports? Do you want the debug info from the console app?

aufreak3• 13 years ago

Google's NaCl set out to solve this same problem (pretty much), but I'm beginning to think Grun's Arc might completely shadow Google's work here for many reasons, not the least of which is total flexibility of development environment (i.e. no need for a special "sdk", except to communicate with the browser).

Dear Grun - Go you!

Show HN: Native apps for the browser

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