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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

#371

Post by fn1 »

saagarjha wrote: post #246
Klonoar wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack originally was platform specific webviews, and migrated to avoid issues like what is mentioned in this thread. One of the engineers who did it has even commented on HN to explain this.

This is probably the comment you're talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18763449 . I was unconvinced then, and I am even more unconvinced now as I run a fully native Cocoa Slack client on my Mac that was written by one person reverse engineering APIs.

That same reasoning is why Google is having a YouTube app on AppleTV which does not use native widgets, so bluetooth keyboards don't work, scrolling is off etc.

It's not that they cannot afford building 10 native AppleTV apps in parallel and pick the best one.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#372

Post by trustdragon »

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…

It is a good idea but it is not a new idea

the interesting history of these sorts of frameworks is that Google actually created a framework that did this and stopped development on it. the code is still on GitHub. And there's a bunch of other frameworks that use a variety of different languages not just rust as the application language that also have this idea of not bundling chromium but instead using the system webview for rendering HTML and JavaScript.

You can find a bunch of different approaches in lists like "alternatives to electron." There's some on GitHub.

I took a slightly different approach where instead of using the system web view which I thought you know is going to be inconsistent across systems and it's not going to support the latest HTML JavaScript and security features I used the assumption that the user already has chrome installed which works in a high number of cases or can download and install it if that's not the case. predictably I suppose some people express to satisfaction that it was not using Firefox. using Firefox becomes more possible and more likely I suppose as firefox's support for the dev tools protocol achieves parity with chrome support for that.

https://github.com/c9fe/graderjs

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#373

Post by galaxyLogic »

Reading all these comments about WebView compatibility issues makes me wonder why not just do Progressive Web Apps"? For the server the OS doesn't matter, and for the browser compatibility issues just deal with them like any web-app would.

What is wrong with separate client and server?

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#375

Post by userbinator »

runarberg wrote: post #70
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. Good, then developers might start to develop against standards instead of handpicked browsers. Or if they use a future (unstable) standard that is their own headache (as opposed to user’s; which are subsequently in practice forced to use chromium derived browser). An app developed against a single browser (as opposed to the web standard)…

"standards" - in practice, it's "what Google wants".

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#376

Post by SeriousM »

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.

Every developer needs to have a certain understanding of the environment he tries to build something. Just like printing 3d models - you need to know the characteristics of the material and limitations of them and the machine you're using. Blaming one of these later on just because you didn't want to read the manual is unprofessional.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#377

Post by userbinator »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #278
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 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. The current generation of web developers who grew up within the Chrome ecosystem has zero interest in spending time on cross browser support. Even if the user had to install 4GB of chrome runtime they'd still argue it's better than them making it work in Chrome, Edge-Chrome and Safari WebKit.…

The current generation of web developers who grew up within the Chrome ecosystem has zero interest in spending time on cross browser support.

The scary power of Google.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#378

Post by niels_bom »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #373

Reading all these comments about WebView compatibility issues makes me wonder why not just do Progressive Web Apps"? For the server the OS doesn't matter, and for the browser compatibility issues just deal with them like any web-app would. What is wrong with separate client and server?

Isn’t there a lot more work to do around local IO and permissions with PWAs?

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#379

Post by jokoon »

I can't help to remind everyone to watch The Birth and Death of Javascript:

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

Cousins of electrons and their RAM requirements are a steep reminder that the DOM is cancerous and will have to evolve and suffer from deprecation.

Or maybe introduce metrics and good performance practices?

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#380

Post by pjmlp »

tene wrote: post #239
pjmlp wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? I couldn't find it.

https://tauri.studio/en/docs/getting-started/technical-detai... "The first generation user interface in Tauri apps leverages Cocoa/WebKit on macOS, gtk-webkit2 on Linux and Webkit via EdgeHTML / Chakra on Windows. Tauri leverages the MIT licensed work known as webview that has been incorporated into the officiall webview_rust bindings."

Thanks, I stand corrected.
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