electron-browser-shell VS Joplin

Tired of walled gardens and increased limitations of Chrome extensions, I'm building enough of the web extensions API to let me run them in my own desktop browser. Eventually I plan to build products from this project.

https://github.com/samuelmaddock/electron-browser-shell

Chrome extension support for Electron-based web browsers: https://github.com/samuelmaddock/electron-browser-shell

Despite a fair amount of folks disliking Electron for replacing traditional desktop apps, I find it's a great fit for building unique web browsers.

I believe there's a lot of opportunity for making interesting web browsers, but building and maintaining them by forking something like Chromium or Firefox is a ton of work.

With Electron, it's possible to create something interesting with a team of one.

I've had great success with using Joplin for this, with Syncthing as a sync backend. Works well across OSes; I use it on Linux, macOS, Windows and Android.

https://joplinapp.org/

The tools to manipulate SQL aren't that bad, no.

But rather than having a self explanatory markdown & flat file, now I have to start learning about the schema & making specific tools (in my preferred language) for manipulating Joplin's schema.

Suddenly I'm digging through 20 different technic specs to decode what data is where, how it works, and what I can do to it. Want to edit history? This is the best help you'll get, pray it's adequately technical to expedite you to your purpose: https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/blob/dev/readme/dev/spec...

As I began with, I struggle to imagine anything that generates anywhere near as much user agency as flat files and markdown. Having boring common data & systems lets me apply portable skills I already have, rather than having to skill up in some particular product's own ecosystem.

Joplin is a good open source option too, feels more like the original Evernote in terms of UI/UX https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/

Joplin, an open source, extendable, Markdown-based hierarchical note-taking app: https://joplinapp.org/

It lets you choose a synchronization backend, offers applications for every major desktop and mobile OS (also has a terminal version). You can create notebooks and subnotebooks to organize your notes. You can also add tags for better search experience. I created notebooks for specific domains (work-related, home improvement, etc.) and also keep a "temp" for quick notes and W.I.P. snippets.

Its only con that it uses Electron on desktop which causes relatively slow start of the application.

done