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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

#101

Post by brundolf »

mumblemumble wrote: post #92
908B64B197 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Some corporations did that. Most didn't. The main reason IE dominated was that most people didn't care, and stuck with the default. The main reason old versions of browsers were more common than new ones was that self-updating browsers hadn't become a thing yet, and most people didn't care, and just stuck with the default. The reason most browsers stay up-to-date now is that modern browsers are all configured to self…

My experience was that IE finally got bad enough (around version 8), and Chrome got good enough, that even "grandmothers" started having everyone telling them to use Chrome, and it was so incredibly superior that you didn't have to be technical to appreciate it.

Now the reason everyone uses it is because it's psychologically the new "default", whether it is on the actual system or not. Everybody knows that's just what you do when you get a new computer: you go install Chrome. And the irony is that even now, with Edge being basically the same thing, most people don't bother to re-evaluate that default assumption that "the windows browser is bad". They just use Chrome.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#102

Post by albertzeyer »

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…

But why would the system webview be less resource hungry? If it runs in an own process instance, the only memory you safe is (maybe) the executable code (i.e. maybe 100MB max).

Or you would need some common runtime which is shared across the OS, and somehow use IPC to it. Then you can potentially save some more memory. But I don't think this exists. And I'm also not sure how much you really would save.

The advantage of using the system webview is that you can update this component, in case there are any vulnerabilities or so.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#103

Post by moron4hire »

livre wrote: post #97
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…

Not much different but enough to be dangerous. Older Windows use Trident, 10 still uses EdgeHTML, many people are stuck with old Androids that don't have up to date engines (not sure if Android is a target, wasn't easy to find in their website), and webviews have access to the system in ways a website doesn't (like reading files or using the camera without having to ask for permission or being allowed to issue reques…

But we know from web statistics that these are very few people and shrinking every year.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#105

Post by jmaygarden »

I started to build some internal tools (that utilize Rust libraries to interface with hardware) using Tauri last year. That effort ended after trying to cross-compile to aarch64 and hitting a ton of roadblocks. It looks like it is still an open issue. So, Raspberry Pi, for example, is not supported.

https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/issues/941

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#106

Post by postalrat »

happytoexplain wrote: post #9
Thaxll wrote: post #4

It's writen in Rust it must be good.

I supposed you're being sarcastic. The realistic version of this is that we have experience and evidence that tells us that it has the potential to be more performant.

So does the assembly version I just started work on.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#107

Post by brundolf »

datalus wrote: post #90
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…

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

I worked on a highly complex web app for ~3 years, and we made a point to support Firefox, so whenever somebody had a Firefox-specific bug we wouldn't tell them to just use Chrome, we'd fix it. We only had 2-3 Firefox-specific issues in that entire time.

I have heard that mobile safari can be a bit more unruly than the rest, though it isn't really relevant to the question at hand

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#108

Post by brundolf »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #98
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…

> A major benefit of Electron is that you can develop against a single browser version and don't have to deal with all the small but time consuming compatibility quirks. Somehow I doubt the ideal solution is to bundle a web browser with every app. Electron feels like a prototype that went out of control.

Nearly every successful technology is a prototype that went out of control :)

That doesn't mean we shouldn't try and improve on things given the opportunity, but it's not an indictment either

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#109

Post by jlokier »

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…

I run three browsers on my desktop, because the number of things that don't work properly in anything except recent Chrome is enough that I keep encountering issues, I don't want to use Chrome for my regular browsing, and both Safari and Firefox have issues on some sites.

On my tablet, a number of current websites don't run even on Chrome, because the tablet isn't particularly new, so it doesn't have current Chrome. It's still great hardware in perfect condition though, everything that does run on it is perfectly smooth and so on, and I still use it. Youtube in particular is fine. Literally the only reason to buy a new one would be to satisfy the software treadmill.

My old phone didn't run Chrome (or Safari). It had Firefox. The only reason I switched to a newer phone, using Android, was because of sites that gradually didn't run well on Firefox any more. That was annoying, having to ditch a perfectly great phone and replace it with something better for the web but worse for other things.

I have a Macbook Pro at home. I'm pretty happy with it, it's still a fine machine, I use it for work every day. It runs the latest Safari that's safe to run on it, but that's not the latest Safari, because it would have problems running the most recent OS.

This brave new world of "I'm sure we'll be fine supporting recentish Chrome and latest Safari" is a world of exclusion. I don't like the memory usage of Electron, but I prefer it to applications that are a bit broken!

Also, to be honest, I've been looking at memory usage. Electron uses much less than any of the three big browsers. You may know that Chrome famously starts a new process for each tab, and Safari does too. Firefox isn't far behind. As a result, the memory saved by running a new page in an already running browser compared with Electron isn't as much as it was long ago, back in the days when tabs shared memory. This is visible with Safari, as the website name shows up in the system utility for viewing process memory.

I know, that feels wrong somehow, but it's true.

Finally, when using a system WebView, will that save memory if it's opening a separate instance of the system's browser? It must be separate in some ways, if opening an application that uses a WebView doesn't open all your saved tabs from last time the browser was open. (And it's a horrible experience if opening an application does open all the other tabs.)

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#110

Post by 908B64B197 »

mumblemumble wrote: post #92
908B64B197 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Some corporations did that. Most didn't. The main reason IE dominated was that most people didn't care, and stuck with the default. The main reason old versions of browsers were more common than new ones was that self-updating browsers hadn't become a thing yet, and most people didn't care, and just stuck with the default. The reason most browsers stay up-to-date now is that modern browsers are all configured to self…

> I have never bought a prebuilt Windows PC, so this is pure speculation, but I am wildly guessing that the dominance of Chrome is because computers are now coming with Chrome preinstalled and configured as the default

I'm not aware of any Windows machines shipping with Chrome pre-installed. But as soon as you use any website that's owned by Google you get spammed with install links for Chrome.

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