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Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

tauri.studio

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Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#41

Post by the_duke »

vlovich123 wrote: post #23
brundolf wrote: post #12

Looks like it uses system webviews instead of bundling a copy of Chromium? This to me seems like the real headlining feature, but strangely I had to dig pretty deep to find it: https://tauri.studio/en/docs/getting-started/technical-detai... I kind of wonder why it took this long for someone to try this approach. It just makes a whole lot more sense on the surface. Interesting thing I just thought about: since users d…

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 si…

> 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.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#42

Post by dylan604 »

hctaw wrote: post #16
pachico wrote: post #6

Each Electron application seems to think it's the only one running in a computer. It's the only way, I imagine, they think it's acceptable the amount of resources they need to run.

As a developer shipping executables to MacOS, Windows, and Linux today this is the only assumption I can make. I cannot assume that dependencies exist or are the correct version, I can't assume the user knows that package managers exist or that the dependencies shipped by the package managers are correct, I can't assume anything exists on PATH or LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and I can't even assume that libc or libc++ on a syste…

Bill Gates, is that you? This was Bill's excuse on why Microsoft does not try to optimize the code for their software. Just make the users buy new hardware for each of our sofware updates. Makes perfect sense. /s

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#43

Post by genezeta »

andai wrote: post #18
brundolf wrote: post #12

Looks like it uses system webviews instead of bundling a copy of Chromium? This to me seems like the real headlining feature, but strangely I had to dig pretty deep to find it: https://tauri.studio/en/docs/getting-started/technical-detai... I kind of wonder why it took this long for someone to try this approach. It just makes a whole lot more sense on the surface. Interesting thing I just thought about: since users d…

I heard about a similar project a few months ago but I can't recall the name. I think the downside is that each OS has its own idiosyncratic webview.

Neutralino, maybe?

One significant difference regarding webviews is Neutralino on Windows is using an outdated WebControl (MSHTML/Trident based) and this one seems to be using at least WebView (EdgeHTML based) or even WebView2 (Edge-Chromium) if available, both of which are a major improvement.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#44

Post by brundolf »

the_duke wrote: post #29
brundolf wrote: post #12

Looks like it uses system webviews instead of bundling a copy of Chromium? This to me seems like the real headlining feature, but strangely I had to dig pretty deep to find it: https://tauri.studio/en/docs/getting-started/technical-detai... I kind of wonder why it took this long for someone to try this approach. It just makes a whole lot more sense on the surface. Interesting thing I just thought about: since users d…

A major benefit of Electron is that you can develop against a single browser and runtime version and don't have to deal with all the small but time consuming compatibility quirks. On Windows the default webview engine is still not the new Chromium but old Edge (WebView2 has to be installed separately), Safari has a fair amount of issues and gtk-webkit can be very quirky as well. This is not so significant if your app…

> don't have to deal with all the small but time consuming compatibility quirks

> Webviews are also a moving target so you need a big testing matrix

I say this as a front-end web app dev who would most likely be affected by this kind of shift: it might be slightly less convenient, but I wholeheartedly think it's worth doing, on several levels.

People built web apps 15 years ago in the dumpster-fire that was web standards at the time (and frankly, web tooling too). Browsers, even the good ones, didn't update themselves automatically. Most of the world was still on IE which was actively hostile to web standards for the sake of lock-in (and users weren't even on the same version of IE!). There was nothing like Babel to smooth over the rough edges, there were no polyfills. And even the standards that existed, when you got the opportunity to use them, mostly sucked.

I think, given all that, we can deal with supporting recent-ish Chromium and the latest Safari, if it means bolstering web diversity and saving an order of magnitude in RAM and storage.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#45

Post by MaxBarraclough »

vulcan01 wrote: post #13
twarge wrote: post #7

Downloaded the demo app for macOS; feels like an alien UI even though effort was clearly made to use system widgets. On the positive side, the app is only 4 MB and consumes 50 MB at runtime, so at least they've succeeded in that important aspect.

If I'm not mistaken, this is just because the CSS styling isn't that good, right? Take Slack (which uses Electron) as an example: it looks almost the same on Windows and Mac, but it looks good — because the styling (through CSS) is good.

Is CSS really the major factor in the memory usage of an Electron app?

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#46

Post by [deleted] »

the_duke wrote: post #29
brundolf wrote: post #12

Looks like it uses system webviews instead of bundling a copy of Chromium? This to me seems like the real headlining feature, but strangely I had to dig pretty deep to find it: https://tauri.studio/en/docs/getting-started/technical-detai... I kind of wonder why it took this long for someone to try this approach. It just makes a whole lot more sense on the surface. Interesting thing I just thought about: since users d…

A major benefit of Electron is that you can develop against a single browser and runtime version and don't have to deal with all the small but time consuming compatibility quirks. On Windows the default webview engine is still not the new Chromium but old Edge (WebView2 has to be installed separately), Safari has a fair amount of issues and gtk-webkit can be very quirky as well. This is not so significant if your app…

[deleted]

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#47

Post by modeless »

the_duke wrote: post #29
brundolf wrote: post #12

Looks like it uses system webviews instead of bundling a copy of Chromium? This to me seems like the real headlining feature, but strangely I had to dig pretty deep to find it: https://tauri.studio/en/docs/getting-started/technical-detai... I kind of wonder why it took this long for someone to try this approach. It just makes a whole lot more sense on the surface. Interesting thing I just thought about: since users d…

A major benefit of Electron is that you can develop against a single browser and runtime version and don't have to deal with all the small but time consuming compatibility quirks. On Windows the default webview engine is still not the new Chromium but old Edge (WebView2 has to be installed separately), Safari has a fair amount of issues and gtk-webkit can be very quirky as well. This is not so significant if your app…

I question how major that benefit is. I think strict Electron-only apps are not really that common. All the ones I use have a web version.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#48

Post by munificent »

the_duke wrote: post #29
brundolf wrote: post #12

Looks like it uses system webviews instead of bundling a copy of Chromium? This to me seems like the real headlining feature, but strangely I had to dig pretty deep to find it: https://tauri.studio/en/docs/getting-started/technical-detai... I kind of wonder why it took this long for someone to try this approach. It just makes a whole lot more sense on the surface. Interesting thing I just thought about: since users d…

A major benefit of Electron is that you can develop against a single browser and runtime version and don't have to deal with all the small but time consuming compatibility quirks. On Windows the default webview engine is still not the new Chromium but old Edge (WebView2 has to be installed separately), Safari has a fair amount of issues and gtk-webkit can be very quirky as well. This is not so significant if your app…

> Webviews are also a moving target so you need a big testing matrix.

Even worse, an OS update after you ship your app can spontaneously break it on end user's machines without you knowing or being able to do anything about it.

At least with the web, when new browser versions come out, you can fix your site since users essentially "install" it every time they refresh the page. But an installed app that runs on top of a spontaneously updated framework is the worst of both worlds.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#49

Post by vlovich123 »

brundolf wrote: post #31
vlovich123 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 si…

> 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…

> 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.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#50

Post by unnouinceput »

the_duke wrote: post #41
vlovich123 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 si…

> 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…

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.
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