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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

#81

Post by Kaze404 »

dmix wrote: post #78
vulcan01 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the burden is then on the developer to make sure that they build essentially 3 (maybe more) UI's on platforms that might change under their feet Is this really different from the current state of web development? Front-end developers have to test against Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, at a minimum. For apps that are basically installable websites (like Slack, which has a perfectly functional webapp) this doesn't seem…

And in recent years this has gotten much easier. Cross browser support used to be a pain in the ass. Now most of the time changes aren’t even needed. Besides maybe the odd Firefox or Safari thing.

Funnily enough in my experience it's usually Chrome and Safari that do weird things, which as a Firefox user always gets me dinged on PR reviews :p

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#82

Post by brundolf »

908B64B197 wrote: post #65
brundolf wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 stand…

> 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!) More like: A lot of corporate users mandated a specific version of IE and wouldn't allow anything else to be installed.

Chrome didn't even exist until 2008. Firefox existed and had a foothold, but it was very much a minority. IE was >50% until 2010 and remained the single most popular browser until 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#83

Post by Kaze404 »

notatoad wrote: post #56
smasher164 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People act as if they haven’t dealt browser incompatibilities in the past. Just feature-detect/polyfill and move on.

Some people haven't dealt with browser incompatibilities in the past. Not every developer comes from a webapp background, and electron is a platform to develop desktop apps. desktop app developers don't want to deal with polyfills and feature-detection in their platform.

It's weird to want all the benefits of web development without it's unfortunate quirks in my opinion. If desktop developers don't want to deal with them, which I think is reasonable, they have loads of other tools they can use to build desktop apps (and give the users a better experience most likely).

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#85

Post by ryandrake »

kall wrote: post #32
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.

I think most companies that already decided on the electron UX vs dev effort tradeoff will happily trade user resources for a guaranteed, uniform browser version target. It makes a big difference in development and testing.

Yea, but as a user, it's disappointing, and kind of impossible for me to push back on this trend. I can avoid using these apps, but it's an impotent show of protest. It won't make a difference. User experience, native look and feel, and the user's RAM are all being sacrificed on the altar of More Comfortable Developer Experience.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#86

Post by andrew_ »

devwastaken wrote: post #79
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…

Webviews don't work because they solve very different problems. System webviews will always have different features, break things, and are entirely uncontrollable by the software distributor. This means your software will not be resilient to the future. You cannot access the JS engine the same as you can V8 in most webviews. This means you can't interop with C libraries without some performance destroying hack like c…

It's been a minute since I attempted it on Windows, but transparency of borders and borderless windows with the webview on Windows was next to impossible. It's one of the reasons we used Electron. I'm curious to know if they've solved that, but can't find my mention of it.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#88

Post by alpaca128 »

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.

I recently discovered NeutralinoJS, but I haven't tried it yet.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#89

Post by afavour »

Maledictus wrote: post #80
Brakenshire wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pity they can’t use Servo as the rendering engine, even if it only deals with a small subset of style/layout properties. That kind of parallel layout engine should make building fluid 60fps interfaces a lot easier.

Why can't they?

AFAIK there are no V8 Servo bindings. So in theory (I don’t know Servo well at all) you could render a static HTML document but you’d have no DOM JS APIs to work with.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#90

Post by datalus »

brundolf wrote: post #44
the_duke wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stand…

Make no mistake, it's still a dumpster fire. Just maybe less raging.
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