Comment by jeroenhd

4 years ago

A firewall with a configuration interface running on Electron, just like the horrid free AV solutions for Windows back in the day :) Can't be too critical of that because the developers have already expressed their dislike of Electron on the website, and it makes sense that they won't drop everything for a huge UI rewrite.

This entire thing seems incredibly polished, I'm surprised I haven't heard of this before. For every question and potential limitation for my use cases there seems to be an explanation on their FAQ. I'm definitely going to take this for a spin! Too bad there's no AUR package ready to go yet because I don't really want the burden of updating manually, but all in good time I suppose.

11 comments

jeroenhd

Reply
dhaavi  4 years ago

CTO of Safing here.

Yes, we dislike Electron and tried another route before switching to it. We have our hopes up for the new Microsoft Edge WebView2, which I hope to evaluate soon: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview...

The Portmaster updates itself automatically, and you can use the PKGBUILD for installation until we start publishing it to the AUR near-term.

  • cookiengineer  4 years ago

    What kind of features of electron are you using in the UI?

    If it's only http/websockets and the UI, you could try webkit2gtk or other alternatives. It's actually quite easy to build a gjs or Qt wrapper on Linux. WebKit(Legacy) from webkitgtk also builds on Windows.

    I am currently in the process of making WebKit into a webview that only includes websockets as an API, so the long term goal is to have a minimalistic webview that doesnt have everything that a browser has. [1]

    Maybe it makes sense to combine development efforts?

    [1] https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit

    • dhaavi  4 years ago

      We mainly use http/websockets, but have also started using a feature that will give us the application icon of an executable on Windows.

      We've previously used the webview lib [0] and we will look into it again, as they now support Microsoft's new Edge webview. It's a C and Golang library.

      retrokit definitely looks interesting, can you elaborate on the additional value provided in regards to a simple webview? I just saw that your use case is using it for a full browser. We use a strict CSP for the UI, which works pretty well.

      A collaboration sounds interesting, but as we are still bootstrapping, it will take some time until we'd have the resources to do that.

      [0] https://github.com/webview/webview

      2 replies →

  • senorsmile  4 years ago

    Please also publish a version that does not auto update. The aur package for google-chrome-stable does not allow in app updates, for I g the system to choose. This choice should not be taken away.

    • dhaavi  4 years ago

      You already can disable automatic updating, but this also affects intelligence data.

      We are working on better support for this use case.

franga2000  4 years ago

Here's my take on Electron and anything else resource-intensive: if your UI is either short-lived (like a configuration window) or the main thing you're using (like an IDE), I don't really care how much RAM or anything else it uses.

A firewall configuration windows falls in the first category - you only open it very occasionally and for not very long, so it doesn't really matter how heavy it is. Where Electron (or similar) is really bad are things like Discord, Slack, Spotify, Teams, etc. where you'll likely be running many of them all the time, while you're doing other things that need those resources.