News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust. Parent comment

Re:Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust by vlovich123 on Friday February 19, 2021 @12:51PM (#26195746)
Well Windows is basically Chrome so your diversity will basically be Chrome & WebKit which is what you have anyway. And having all the fun of web development against multiple browsers with all the headaches of desktop distribution is kind of the worst of all worlds. It'll be interesting to see if this approach finds success (since it may cut down on the size of your binary) but it could easily get abandoned if any significant projects start using this as frontend devs create pressure to simplify the stack across platforms.

On Linux it's going to pull in GTK which means a not great experience on KDE (even though KDE does have WebKit hooks like GTK does).

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust by brundolf on Friday February 19, 2021 @12:55PM (#26195804)
> so your diversity will basically be Chrome & WebKit which is what you have anyway

Right now many web apps can brush off doing QA in Safari (and Firefox for that matter). Most regular websites don't have issues, but most of those don't need any vendor-specific fixes in the first place. I've used multiple complex web apps that just break unceremoniously unless you're using Chrome.

If web apps that are complex enough to warrant a desktop app are forced to support Safari, that lifts awareness for the entire web/JS ecosystem. That's a win, if it plays out that way.

> having all the fun of web development against multiple browsers

The difficulty here has gone sharply down since all major browsers are evergreen now (and IE is all-but-gone). Not to mention the availability of tooling like Babel.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust by vlovich123 on Friday February 19, 2021 @01:07PM (#26195952)
> Right now many web apps can brush off doing QA in Safari (and Firefox for that matter). Most regular websites don't have issues, but most of those don't need any vendor-specific fixes in the first place. I've used multiple complex web apps that just break unceremoniously unless you're using Chrome.

There's billions of active iPhones out there & they ALL use WebKit for webviews as no other browser engine is allowed for iOS apps. MacOS desktop apps are a fraction of that number of users & web view apps are a fraction of that. I just I don't follow this reasoning unless you're saying that this might gain traction across developers who might go & fix the bugs. That might help WebKit (although questionable). It's never going to help Firefox which is the sole remaining engine that doesn't have a strategic play to try to encourage compatibility.

> The difficulty here has gone sharply down since all major browsers are evergreen now (and IE is all-but-gone). Not to mention the availability of tooling like Babel.

If that were actually true, would you be concerning yourself with getting devs to do more QA on Safari or Firefox?

The truth is that it's still hard to write web apps cross-browser and will likely remain hard indefinitely as long as there are > 1 web engines. The point of the web was to make you OS agnostic (ironically recreating the same pattern in desktop development of 2 or 3 major engines as with 2 or 3 major OSes) but with this tech you're combining both dealing with the browser-specific issues & OS-specific issues. Additionally, you're now not only having to maintain compatibility across 3 engines, but all the various versions popular versions of the OS distribution will have shipped. I really struggle to see the value of this approach if I'm concerned with shipping the app & lowering my development costs & increasing velocity to shipping useful features.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust by the_duke on Friday February 19, 2021 @01:01PM (#26195890)
> Well Windows is basically Chrome

As far as I know that's not accurate and the default webview on Windows is still the old Edge based one, not Chromium.

The plans here are somewhat unknown I think, but right now you have to force the user to download and install (or bundle an installer) for WebView2 or Edge beta channel if you don't want to support old Edge.

Gtk-webkit is also quite different from Safari, you can't assume they are just the same.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust by FuriouslyAdrift on Friday February 19, 2021 @01:16PM (#26196074)
The latest WebView2 is based on Edge Chromium AFAIK. https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust by unnouinceput on Friday February 19, 2021 @01:07PM (#26195964)
Starting from 20h2 version Edge is based on Chromium. And I remember when that rolled out plenty of people were irked by Microsoft simply automatically installing it (the new Edge Canary) without asking for permission.
[ Parent | on HN ]