The Future of LightBrowser...

… doesn’t look that bad at all, but…

The bad news first:

Let’s face it, LightBrowser 2020 is built upon WinForms, which is almost dead today. Nobody uses it, and only time will tell when MS will deprecate it. This may be one of the following factors, why I am going to leave LB2020 completely (maybe not completely, I thought of an update every 3 to 4 months or so)

The other reason is called: cross-platform-compatibility. Or should I call it a problem? Well, WinForms is just for Windows-based applications. Just recently, I saw, how many applications I use are built on modern frameworks and are supported on a variety of operating systems. As a Windows & Linux user, I take that for granted. This gave me the thought to make LightBrowser cross-platform and it almost grew to a urgent desire to do it “immediately”.

The third reason is: trying something new. As stated before: WinForms is old. I learned how to use it (I absolutely hate the XAML that WPF uses btw.), learned to love and to hate it. Parallel to LB2020, I learned how to use Git more or less properly, which I am pretty proud of and this experience makes me more or less know where I came from. This is why my decision saddens me a bit, but one has to go on and try new things, which is also applicable on real-life events.

But we are not here to yearn for the past, we are here to talk about the future of LightBrowser:

This project site will soon be renamed to indicate, that this project will be not heavily supported anymore and it will only receive updates every few months.

The good news:

I am currently planning on recreating LightBrowser upon Electron. This means that the browser will be cross-platform, always new and stable.

But, this is in very early planning phase. I still have to find my way around Electron, and this is probably going to take a while.

Don’t worry, all that was described above won’t happen soon. I am aiming the first version to be released in late 2020 to early 2021. As soon this happens, this will still be my main project and won’t be depricated.

Until the next update! Raphipod