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Tauri 2.0 Release Candidate

v2.tauri.app

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Re: Tauri 2.0 Release Candidate

#2
I've been following tauri for a bit. It seems very cool and interesting but I've always wondered - what are the use cases for putting your app in a webview instead of using the browser? Everything I've thought of would work just as well.

Re: Tauri 2.0 Release Candidate

#3
post #2

I've been following tauri for a bit. It seems very cool and interesting but I've always wondered - what are the use cases for putting your app in a webview instead of using the browser? Everything I've thought of would work just as well.

Is it not lighter weight?

Re: Tauri 2.0 Release Candidate

#4
post #2

I've been following tauri for a bit. It seems very cool and interesting but I've always wondered - what are the use cases for putting your app in a webview instead of using the browser? Everything I've thought of would work just as well.

The goal is to make a standalone desktop app with access to local resources, so the question is "why should you put your app in a webview instead of Electron or a native toolkit?"

The answer is that Electron forces you to carry a whole Chrome installation around, which is unnecessarily heavy, and (AIUI) you have a node.js backend giving you the means to touch the actual OS, whereas Tauri lets you write Rust (YMMV as to whether that's an advantage). Both Tauri and Electron let you use a web-based interface instead of mucking about with native widgets, which are a pain for cross-platform development.

Re: Tauri 2.0 Release Candidate

#5
post #2

I've been following tauri for a bit. It seems very cool and interesting but I've always wondered - what are the use cases for putting your app in a webview instead of using the browser? Everything I've thought of would work just as well.

For example a reader app where you can't host everything on the server. My ebooks collection is 1TB big, and my videos are something like 20TB.

Re: Tauri 2.0 Release Candidate

#7
post #2

I've been following tauri for a bit. It seems very cool and interesting but I've always wondered - what are the use cases for putting your app in a webview instead of using the browser? Everything I've thought of would work just as well.

Write once run everywhere is the holy grail of app development and the browser is the only realistic way of achieving this.

Re: Tauri 2.0 Release Candidate

#8
post #2

I've been following tauri for a bit. It seems very cool and interesting but I've always wondered - what are the use cases for putting your app in a webview instead of using the browser? Everything I've thought of would work just as well.

Can anyone explain what Tauri or webviews offer that makes them a good choice over a local-http-server webapps? Imo, as a user, Webview, no thanks. Local webapps, yes please.

There really isn't a good reason for webviews or electron/tauri that I can tell? Why some people love love love native apps, to the extent they'd rather a dressed up webapps is confusing to me. If it's already a webapps, hell yeah give me the user-agency of extensions, browser history, tabs, back buttons, and hyperlinks or give me death! Anything but the power-stripping captive-audience of native apps!

It would be much better to package your app as a small daemon that hosts a localhost webserver. The daemon can talk to all the system APIs it needs to. Add a desktop icon or shortcut that opens the localhost webpage. The daemon can present just a regular HTML hypertext webapps as usual, so all the usual bits of user-agency can slot into the overall experience.

Theres a lot of usenet-related apps that work like this, that run as daemons, and have web interfaces. Sunshine game streaming too.

It's be great to have some massively multi-platform http-headed app frameworks! That does seem semi missing, especially wrt mobile integration.

Re: Tauri 2.0 Release Candidate

#9
post #2

I've been following tauri for a bit. It seems very cool and interesting but I've always wondered - what are the use cases for putting your app in a webview instead of using the browser? Everything I've thought of would work just as well.

I mean there are so many reasons why you would want to do this it's impossible to enumerate them all. Key command overrides are a great example of bad behavior on the web that is essential to UX in a native app. Or mouse pointer control. File system access and other native APIs the browser doesn't expose, or makes a pain.

Re: Tauri 2.0 Release Candidate

#10
post #2

I've been following tauri for a bit. It seems very cool and interesting but I've always wondered - what are the use cases for putting your app in a webview instead of using the browser? Everything I've thought of would work just as well.

You build something that needs access to to the filesystem? -> No other choice than a desktop app. (Chrome has some limited APIs around that, but AFAIK only sandboxes ones and not e.g. existing directories)
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