> I recently went the other way (started a project in Tauri, moved to Electron) because of frustration with rendering differences between the web views employed on different platforms.
This is our #1 frustration with Tauri. The OS-provided system webviews are not stable, repeatable, consistent platforms to build upon.
Tauri decided that a key selling point of their platform was that Tauri builds won't bundle a browser runtime with your application. Instead, you wind up with whatever your operating system's browser runtime is. Each OS gets a different runtime.
Sounds nice on paper, but that has turned into a massive headache for us.
Safari and Edge have super finicky non-standard behavior, and it sucks. Different browser features break frequently. You're already operating in such a weird way between the tight system sandboxing and CORS behaviors (different between each browser), the subtle differences are death by a thousand cuts. And it never seems to stop stacking up. These aren't small CSS padding issues, but rather full-blown application behavior breakages. Even "caniuse.com" is wrong about the compatibility matrix with built-in web views.
To be fair, we're using advanced browser features. Animation, 2D contexts, trying to do things like pointer lock. But these are all examples of things that are extremely different between each web view.
All of this has doubled (quadrupled - with dev and prod builds behaving so differently! - but that's another story) the amount of physical testing we have to do. It takes so much time to manually test and ship. When we were building for the web, this wasn't an issue even if people used different browsers. The webviews have incredibly different behavior than web browsers.
Their rationale for using OS-provided system webviews instead of a bundled runtime baked into the installer at build time is that it would save space. But in reality all it has done is created developer frustration. And wasted so much freaking time. It's the single biggest time sink we have to deal with right now.
We were sold on Tauri because of Rust, but the system browser runtime is just such a bad decision. A self-imposed shotgun wound to the chest.
The Tauri folks have heard these complaints, and unfortunately their approach to solving it is to put Servo support on the roadmap. That's 1000% not the right fix. Servo is not even a production-ready platform. We just want Chrome.
Please just let us bundle a modern chrome with our apps. It's not saving anyone any headache with smaller programs and installer sizes. Games are already huge and people tolerate them. Lots of software is large. It's accepted, it's okay, it's normal. We have a lot of space, but we don't have a lot of time. That's the real trade off.
I want to use Rust. I want to use Chrome.
I hope the Tauri devs are reading this. It's not just from me. This is the general community consensus.
Built-in webviews are not the selling point for Tauri. Rust is.