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One thing I don't see mentioned is the horror of shipping for Windows. You'll need Windows to have the Edge runtime, which means you have to bundle it or install it as an add-on. People will complain about this, especially IT people, because Edge runtime runs some kind of stupid background service all the time for no clear reason. It's also brittle since you will have to constantly keep your installer up to date with new releases of the Edge runtime or use a fragile MS URL that could stop working at any time and that won't work behind some firewalls.

TL;DR: trying to use the native web view on Windows is horrible because there is no native web view and MS can't bundle software for their own platform.

Of course I suppose shipping any software for Windows is horrible...

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Tauri has options to take care of that.

Microsoft's WebView2 has three distribution options: the "evergreen bootstrapper," the "evengreen standalone installer," and "fixed version" (where you embed a browser version in your installer).

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview...

Tauri supports all three of those mechanisms. If you choose to embed the browser directly in your installer, it adds 100MB+ to your installer size, but it's guaranteed to work anywhere. (They even support Windows 7.)

https://tauri.app/v1/guides/building/windows#webview2-instal...

You are a little behind. Edge webview is included in Windows 11 by default. On Windows 10 the installer downloads it automatically. You don't have to do anything.

Does it work on Windows 10 Enterprise running Crowdstrike in the EU during a full moon on an odd numbered day while it's raining?

Being sarcastic of course, but... hey maybe I'll take another look.

It doesn't help for most corporate environments (at least, not yet), but Windows 11 ships with the Edge WebView2 Runtime. They are "evaluating" shipping it via Windows Update to Windows 10 machines that are domain-joined: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2022/06/27/delivering-th...

Man, there are a lot of incorrect statements in this.

MS keeps the evergreen bootstrapper URL stable specifically so you can download it programmatically, it’s not fragile. And if you choose to ship the evergreen bootstrapper yourself, you don’t have to update it.

The WebView2 runtime ships with Windows 11, major applications like Office, and they’re currently rolling it out to most Windows 10 installs.

The problem is enterprise environments where they tend to run stripped down locked down Windows installations and don't like to upgrade.

We used to use a native webview in an app and found that our app (packaged as MSI) would not install in a lot of enterprise environments because they don't allow secondary installers not signed by the same key as the primary installer. That means no bundling or side loading Edge. They would also require special security policy review to install Edge, making the whole thing really painful.

If you are only targeting personal end users a lot of what I said may not apply but it absolutely does apply in enterprise.

P.S. We did finally drop Windows 7 support a while back but we still get asked for it regularly. We get asked for Windows XP every now and then. Enterprise.

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