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Comment by codeptualize | Hacker News Reader

I haven't used it myself (yet), but https://tauri.app/ looks very promising as Electron alternative.

It uses the OS's browser so it doesn't have the bundle size issue you describe.

I've tried it. It's a very strong effort but if you want to support Windows then welcome to hell.

You'll need to ship Microsoft's new Edge runtime thing, which is a separate package. You'll either have to include that giant package in your package or download it on demand, and the latter is very brittle and will fail if MS changes their URLs or you're installing inside a very heavily firewalled (whitelisted) environment. If your product runs in enterprise settings you will get complaints from IT people about how your single installer installs a "hidden" second installer that they don't want, especially since the Edge runtime runs some kind of system service (why?) all the time. You'll have to basically take over maintaining up to date Edge runtimes in your bundles and handling edge cases because Microsoft can't ship software for their own OS. People will complain that if they uninstall your app it does not fully uninstall because it leaves the Edge runtime.

Tauri just works everywhere else but the headaches on Windows defeat the purpose to some extent.

Of course I guess shipping anything for Windows is "welcome to hell." The only way to have a package that installs and runs reliably is to bundle Every. Single. DLL. And. Dependency... or statically link it.

As another Windows application developer targeting enterprise users, thanks for the warning. Electron it is, I guess. Either that, or using the IE engine for web views, or no web views at all.

Edit: I'm already using Electron, though I've been wishing I could move away from it.

If you are shipping software for Windows just make sure your insurance has good mental health coverage.

Heh, I've been shipping software for Windows one way or another for about 20 years. I just hadn't used Edge's WebView2 in anger yet, and now I probably won't.

Edit: And I've generally followed the "bundle every dependency" approach. As far as I can recall, the only dependency in a shipping product that I ever delegated to an external installer was the .NET Framework (before the .NET Core reboot). And IIRC, that did trip up a few users; thankfully, that was only a consumer app.

You should verify the original commenters statements hold true in your target environment(s). Office has started heavily relying on WebView2, any enterprise using Office should have WebView2 updating working properly. Ditto for Windows 11.

Not sure what time period the original commenter is referring to, this story has developed quite a bit over the past year, even into last month - https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2022/06/27/delivering-th...

Edit: and if your alternative is Electron, WV2’s fixed runtime is the same concept as Electron in a static Chromium version - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/con...

Thanks. That is good to know!

I don't think this is accurate as Windows 10 and Windows 11 have edge built in, as WebView2, which is used for some internal Microsoft programs now as well, and older windows systems are not supported in any way by Microsoft themselves anymore, so it seems safe to ignore them now. I've had no issues with Tauri on Windows however, and I even compile it from Linux.

Isn’t the downside to this then that although you’re using the native browser you’re losing the whole point of Electron which is to have a consistent environment regardless of where it’s run?

That is a downside. However, it's better to look at Tauri like you might look at React Native. If complete consistency between platforms is required, Tauri still saves you time by letting you write a single codebase and then do a low effort port to each platform. For many applications, Tauri applications will look the same between platforms out of the box.

That's the pitch anyway. People can spend a lot of time on ios vs android in react native applications, so ymmv

Probably. But I don't think that is very problematic.

Browsers have become a lot more standardized. What also helps a lot is that windows is now Chromium edge instead of IE or old edge. Testing tools have also come a long way.

It's the same as building web-apps.

Specifically Tauri uses web views that are based on Chrome or Safari on systems, and only if they don't exist by default will it package it, which somehow still ends up smaller than electron. But on Mac and Windows it is tiny, and on Linux it is still surprisingly much smaller than electron, but it is a consistent environment.

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