// the find
jordwalke/one-click.js
One Click, Offline, CommonJS Modules in the browser
A browser-side CommonJS module loader that requires no build step or web server — you literally double-click the HTML file. It's aimed at local development and prototyping, specifically for cases where spinning up a dev server is more friction than the task is worth.
The iframe-per-module isolation trick is genuinely clever — it gives you scoping without source transforms, which is the hard part of this problem. The node resolution algorithm (relative paths and node_modules) means existing CommonJS code mostly just works. Zero config: drop in a script tag with data-main and you're done. The README is honest about the tradeoffs, which is rare.
Abandoned since 2019 — ES modules with import maps solve this problem natively now in every modern browser, making this approach obsolete. The double-initialization to build the dependency graph is a real footgun: any module with side effects at load time will run twice, and the README buries this. The iframe-per-module design means instanceof checks break across module boundaries, which is a category of bug that's very hard to debug when you first hit it. Single 400-line file with no tests.