Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

I don't understand how this is materially better than Tauri (more generally, frameworks that bind to the platform webview).

At least with the platform webview, you can:

1. Have some knowledge about what engine versions were available on what OS versions and make compatibility decisions accordingly.

2. Know that the browser engine is always there.

When it comes to trade-offs between "static linking" (Electron) and "dynamic linking" (Tauri), this is like cowboy linking. You have literally no idea what browser will open. I guess this isn't materially different from a remotely hosted backend but I still wonder of the merits.

And why communicate over a websocket, or not have a custom protocol that you can handle and register with the OS more easily? I like the general idea but this seems inferior to a webview in almost every way.

I do see how you might get things like extensions easier, but I'd rather petition the platforms to add extension support and close other gaps directly in their webview runtimes.

And is it just localhost under the hood? If so it reminds me of this Zoom security debacle a few years ago:

https://archive.ph/3fxFS

This! I hate when an app's GUI is following Windows-principles (if at all) and the macOS version is basically the same with a macOS theme slapped on top of it.

About 10 years ago I've experimented with an early version of appcelerator Titanium for mobile app development. It was JavaScript but GUI rendering was transcoded to either Android-Java or Apple-ObjectiveC and the respective code was compiled natively (while running your main code via a JavaScript engine). With a bit of if-then-else you could make one app that compiled for both platforms and looked and felt native on both.

Reminds me of the approach of CLOG (Common Lisp Omnificent Gui[1]) and its ancestor GNOGA (The GNU Omnificent GUI for Ada[2]).

They also integrate basic components and even graphical UI editor (at least for CLOG), so you can essentially develop the whole thing from inside CL or Ada

[1] https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

[2] https://github.com/alire-project/gnoga

web assembly?

If that were the problem, then Electron wouldn't help in any way either. In fact, Electron is even less interested in platform conventions than something like Swing. There isn't even default styling that tries to copy MacOS/Windows that you can apply.

The bigger problem is actually desktop-mobile compatibility today. No one writes apps only for Windows and MacOS. You want an app that works on iOS, Android, Windows and MacOS, and typically on the web as well so people can occasionally access it from an unfamiliar computer. So, the only viable option unless you want to have 4 dedicated UI teams or so is to write it in the lowest common denominator of HTML/CSS/JS, and use Electron and WebView to distribute it.

To a very good approximation, no one whatsoever cares about platform look and feel. In fact, most people actively prefer if they're using an app for it to have the same look and feel across all systems where they use it, including the web.