In general, why would one take this approach of embedding a browser, compiling to WASM, etc. over a native UI?
I'm genuinely curious why/when this is a better solution.
I'm genuinely curious why/when this is a better solution.
Unlike Electron, Webview does not embed a browser, but uses the platform-native browser engine. That's Cocoa/WebKit on Mac OS and Edge on Windows. Since Linux doesn't have a one, gtk-webkit is used there.
This allows for very small binaries, but necessitates dealing with the platform incompatibilities.
Given this experience, I just don't get how cross-platform UI-frameworks are somehow a bigger PITA than pulling in and involving a whole other set of technologies.
Brings up a third point when talking about development. Microsoft is providing a posix compatible dev environment under Win10. The threat that poses is completely unappreciated.
But all of that is really beside the point. Saying the "community" needs to fix it means they won't put time or effort into doing it themselves, which by extension means the integration will most likely never be as good as what they have prioritised. This will relegate their "cross-platform" solution to the realm of all the other frameworks: Bad.
I mean ideally you'd create a native application for all operating systems and use their native frameworks, but you need to hire at least two developers (for redundancy / knowledge sharing) per platform and it'll be a constant struggle to keep features aligned. It can be done, but you need a clear vision, alignment, some independence for the native app developers, etc.
But it's pretty much unfeasible for solo developers.
Given that most of these have bindings to many languages, I don't understand why one would involve a browser-runtime and whole other set of technologies.
Two Qt apps that I use are Calibre and Ripcord, the two ugliest apps on my computer. Not that I'm complaining, but never lines up with HN's why-would-you-use-a-browser Qt praise.
The fact that it's possible to not build an "app that looks native or actually looks good" doesn't imply that it's impossible to build one that does, though.
And I actually tend to prefer wxWidgets, as this wraps the platform's native widgets proper, whereas Qt reimplements many (all?) widgets, but attempts to offer a native look-and-feel.
Regardless: Actual GUI-frameworks have huge advantages to using a browser, like:
- Better performance
- Visual and UX consistency (HCI, people!) on a shared platform
- Smaller sized apps
- Drastically reduced resource and energy usage
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Software_that_uses_Qt
And again we managed as solo developers, or with very tiny teams to do that in the context of 8 and 16 bit home micros, which meant writing lots of Assembly and hardware specific code in the process.
So I guess strangely younger generations cannot manage to go to school bare foots uphill in snow both ways.