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 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.
- File System (Obsidian, Logseq)
- Push Notifications (IM, Social Media, Email)
- USB/Bluetooth (Doesn't work in Safari?)
- Global Hotkeys (Raycast)
- Interfacing with other local Apps (localhost is often blocked)
It’s also something that came about from when web apps on desktop/PWA didn’t have nearly as much reach. With e.g modern macOS support for PWAs you might be able to get away with just the web app now, depending on your target customer.
As for WinUI 3, apps are supposed to bundle it, so if you target Windows 11 and run the app on Windows 10, it'll look all rounded and drop-shadowy instead of flat like native Windows 10 apps. Great stuff.
Not even portable Web code, they rather ship a copy of Chrome, and then complain Google has taken over the Web.
You can do a lot of things in the browser, but usually it's limited (mainly for security reasons). Having it be an app allows you to better integrate with the OS.
An end-user can continue to use your electron/tauri app for years after a website has long since vanished into the infinite void.
But vunderba you think to yourself and also how did I know what you were thinking just call me the amazing kreskin, "what about a PWA? - you can use that off-line".
PWAs give the deceptive illusion to the laymen that they're installing an actual application as opposed to just a bunch of ephemeral stuff thrown inside the user data folder of the respective browser.
This kind of makes it way more lightweight but only in some situations (obv. heavily depending on the functionality of the app).
I used tauri so I could easily make that cross-platform toolbar app.
Some menu items spawn a webview (things like settings), everything else is in Rust.
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.
It seems so inferior to have the same thing but lose access to the browser's suite of tools/capabilities. What could possibly change other people's opinion or what should I use to reconsider my perspective?
I’m talking from a position of “I have an app that I want to distribute to a population of end users.” If that population happens to be technical your solution would likely work fine. As well if you’re not distributing apps to end users you can do what’s right for you. But if you are you have to meet your users where they’re at.
As well operating outside of the browser has the advantage of OS integration (tray access, alt tab support, etc).
Clearly not true.
Sonarr and Radarr for example installs like a normal app. Then sits in the system tray. If click the system tray, most options inside launch a web browser that brings you to the localhost webapp. https://sonarr.tv/
People seem to assume this would be a hard to handle thing, but you can easily applicationize your local web services. And your local web service daemon can expose things like a system tray, to afford some classic manageability.
Explicitly removing the browser capabilities/tools is a feature imo. i.e to hide the moving parts.
Within a browser, the average low tech users may:
- ...install extensions(ad blockers? dark reader?) that interfere with the app in some way.
- ...mess with the back/forward buttons ,corrupting the router/ui state, or just get very curious why the back button kicks them back to the last page instead of closing a fullscreen modal.
- ...bookmark SPA js-driven pages where the ui state is not fully saved in the address bar(via query params, hashes, etc) and surprisingly find them broken/not working as intended when accessing the bookmark again.
- ...try to copy and send the "localhost" link to their friends and complain.(Hold on to your papers - I've seen this behavior at my workplace!)
All of those will generate complains, useless bug reports and sometimes negative reviews. While some (if not most) of the problems can be solved with great software design and extra care, I think solving these problems comes at a cost that can be very well avoided by simply removing these capabilities.
It just turns out due to historical reasons, in 2024, "the web" has the most easy-to-get-running cross platform UX system available, where you can produce an icon that people click, and it opens the app. That's basically the long and short of it.
At the end of the day most of the stuff you mentioned doesn't matter because these are, from the beginning, designed as applications that use the web as a way to deliver UI more than anything. Things you mention like back buttons (requiring you to design around stateless hypertext APIs rather than what would be local RPC, and which may be better handled inside the system anyway with e.g. its own undo system) or "browser history" either have large design consequences, or just don't make any sense at all.
To be clear, it's very useful in some cases to have the design you describe (true client/server architecture), and underneath it all Tauri does something like that. But it alone can't fulfill all the use cases something like Tauri or Electron aim to.
> The daemon can talk to all the system APIs it needs to.
That's not the problem, it's the impact on the downstream design, like the fact such a daemon can't cleanly interact with the native windowing context of the (existing) browser or operating system without duplication. You cannot add a proper system menu bar or global shortcuts to the design you described in any way that won't either be sucky and fiddly, or just outright reimplementing what Tauri already does anyway. Or consider alt tabbing and wanting to dial in on a specific app window. There are tons of small things like this that do not work.