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Comment by adrusi | Hacker News Reader

It's not very clear from their docs, but it looks like tauri is mostly a way to launch a system WebView from rust and communicate with it via message passing. Doesn't really seem like a GUI toolkit for rust, since all the GUI stuff is going to be done in JS.

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The same can be said of Electron.

The difference is that Electron guarantees you're always using a known version/engine. With Tauri, you'd be using whatever is installed, and that engine may behave different from what you are used to.

So basically you get all the drawbacks of developing for different web browsers, without really any of the benefits a cross-platform GUI gives you.

Just like building for the web then? In that scenario you also do not know what version the browser is (or even what kind of browser).

An advantage would be that the browser gets security patches by the OS.

Is this really a problem now that IE11 is finally being deprecated? You basically have Blink/Gecko/Webkit which is no different from regular web dev

Does it use less RAM because it's shared with the system browser? I sure as hell avoid all the Electron based apps because of their memory consumption.

Cross-browser compatibility is not too bad these days.

I did some testing using webview (https://github.com/Boscop/web-view) which is used by Tauri if I'm not mistaken. On Linux this uses webkitgtk, and it used a total of around 100 MB. That's not that good, but certainly better compared to Electron.

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