but then you have to contend with the various potential different webviews from different OS'es.

The weight of an app is more than just the size on disk, which tbh, is insignificant in today's harddrive. What's a couple hundred extra megs?

The advantage of shipping your own browser is the control, and thus, reduction in having to support multiple different webviews and the bugfixing associated with that.

As someone who cut their teeth on web development when we still had to deal with IE6, I just don't think this is a problem. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've had to fix major inconsistencies between browsers over the past few years.

Imagine being able to run ten 1.6GB Electron apps in only 16GB of RAM - it's super efficient!

Wouldn't a web app have to deal with running in the various browsers anyway?

yes, a web based app would have to contend with the same issue. So what's the advantage of shipping a packaged app that also have the same problem, when shipping it as an electron app would solve this directly and easily?

The packaged app can work with the local file system, and call additional native APIs that aren’t available in a browser context.

The main advantage is that the Tauri app runs its non-render contexts in Rust, on the metal, rather than in the javascript vm.

The secondary advantage is that you don't have to update and ship a new binary every time Chromium updates.