Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

tauri.studio

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 438 posts

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#221

Post by swagonomixxx »

slater wrote: post #136
swagonomixxx wrote: post #39

This kind of makes me think... is there room for a much more stripped down version of Chromium that is suitable for lower memory footprint? Or is this impossible? It looks like Tauri uses system webviews, which use a lot less memory, but 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. That's why the Electron approach is…

Electrino, but looks abandoned: https://github.com/pojala/electrino

Wow, at least from the screenshot in the README, the binary size is much smaller. However I think that's just from the fact that they don't bundle the JavaScript engine and the rendering engine into their binary. You're right though, seems abandoned.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#222

Post by themihai »

I think a better electron would be an Electron that you can build only with the features you use(i.e I don't use websql, I don't need CORS, web notifications, nfc, bluetooth, hundreds of legacy js and css features, no pdf/print support etc). I'm pretty sure that if you can drop all the stuff you don't use you get better performance/efficiency.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#223

Post by y2bd »

keskadale wrote: post #178

Question: Why do we need Electron alternatives? Why do we need to develop applications that need a bundled browser to run? Why can't we just use GTK/Qt?

The two main reasons I’ve always heard against QT in particular are

1. Non C++ devs don’t want to write C++/participate in the C++ ecosystem at all. While there are plenty of QT binding libraries for other languages, they seem to be of varying and unpredictable quality.

2. QT has potentially difficult licensing: https://www.qt.io/licensing/

Disclaimer: I’ve never used QT.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#224

Post by ahepp »

brundolf wrote: post #82
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.

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...

what happened in 2018-07?

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#225

Post by plorkyeran »

hobofan wrote: post #100
danudey wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because then you'll get a more efficient app that people don't constantly complain about? Especially on macOS, where Chrome/Chromium have historically been extremely inefficient, swapping the Chromium engine for WebKit2 WebViews would mean battery, memory, and CPU savings which would absolutely be worth the effort IMHO.

Apart from the install size which is still not optimal, it is very much possible to write an efficient Electron app, as evidenced by Discord and Element. That Slack, the poster child of bad Electron apps performs so badly must therefore have different reasons. Exactly the same way you can write websites in a way that is more or less efficient you can write Electron apps of varying degrees of efficiency.

Discord is efficient now? I have to restart it on a regular basis because it starts using 5+ GB of ram.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#226

Post by CommonGuy »

dfabulich wrote: post #121
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…

People have been trying the WebView approach for years. (Projects include: Quark, Electrino, DeskGap, Revery, and Neutralino.) Historically, it worked terribly on Windows. On Windows, if you used the OS WebView, your Windows 7 users would be forced to use IE11 to run your app, even if they had a newer/better browser installed locally. On Windows 10, you'd get whatever random version of Edge was installed, or the new…

We use the WebView approach for Kreya[1], though not with Tauri. We had some occassional issues with Chromium/Safari differences, but otherwise it works fine.

We use WebView2 on Windows, Safari on macOS and WebKit2GTK on Linux. Not shipping a whole Chromium installation on each install and update reduces the installer and on-disk size a lot!

[1] https://kreya.app

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#227

Post by briandear »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #217
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…

That's fine for someone who already keeps current with front-end stuff, but someone who is a desktop app developer is more likely to just go native than try to make a desktop app that tracks 3+ browser engines of wildly varying versions (luckily 7 is out of support now, but it still might be desired to support for some desktop apps in which case now you have IE to deal with). Electron gives the promise of total code…

> Electron gives the promise of total code re-use across platforms which is what makes web technologies more suitable for desktop apps.

I am not sure what the point is of Electron: a shitty-resource hungry app that literally is a wrapped web-app. Instead of writing platform specific apps that leverage the power and capabilities of those platforms, we get a jack of all trades and master of none. Electron is a business decision, not an enlightened technical one.

What value does electron add to the user? I would argue none. That Slack can’t find the resources to write actual Swift for a Mac App is just amazing to me. Instead we are essentially interacting with a lowest-common-denominator web app. Is a chat app that hard to write natively? We’d get better performance, a smaller footprint, and a more polished, platform-specific product.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#228

Post by calibas »

MattGaiser wrote: post #112
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…

> Front-end developers have to test against Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, at a minimum. Do many companies actually do this though? I've only ever been with companies that test against Chrome. The one time at FF bug was found, that company told that client to switch to Chrome. I know there was a kerfuffle about Airbnb and Groupon only doing Chrome as well. https://www.reddit.com/r/AirBnB/comments/dv7v6n/customer_sup...…

Most companies today use frameworks that have good cross-compatibility so it tends to just work. In my opinion though, a responsible web developer is going to test on multiple browsers at the very least.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#230

Post by ketzo »

keskadale wrote: post #178

Question: Why do we need Electron alternatives? Why do we need to develop applications that need a bundled browser to run? Why can't we just use GTK/Qt?

There is a lot of effort currently being put into creating web applications. It would be nice if we could use the fruits of that labor on desktop and mobile applications.

That's how I understand it, anyway.

Post reply on HN