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Comment by yojo | Hacker News Reader

The promise of Electron is the version of chrome you develop on is the version that ships with your app. If it looks right on your machine, it looks right on whoever is running it. This is much nicer than when doing web development and deciding which browsers/browser versions to test and support.

Tauri does not bundle chrome with your app. This makes the bundle size much smaller. But the tradeoff is you end up rendering in whatever the default web view browser is. On Mac this will be some version of Safari (depending on MacOS version), and on Windows it will be some recent-ish Edge thing. Tauri actually has a nice page breaking this down: https://v2.tauri.app/reference/webview-versions/

This also means that a new OS release can change how your app is rendering, so a user can conceivably have a UI bug appear without updating your app.

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Does anyone actually choose to ship an Electron app instead of a web app in order to benefit from UI consistency? Most Electron apps I've seen either share a codebase with a web app that's also made available (so the codebase still has to be tested cross-browser), or else can't be web apps because they need full filesystem privileges or otherwise don't work with the browser's security model.

Yep, we use Electron specifically because it gives us a locked-down version of Chromium with a consistent WebGPU implementation. Without that, we're stuck dealing with whatever browser version the user happens to have, and that completely wrecks the stability of our GPU pipeline.

Okay, fair, none of the apps I had in mind make much use of WebGPU and it stands to reason that browser diversity might be a bigger problem with a very complicated and relatively less mature API like that one.

Yes, it is the biggest selling point. You almost never need to debug user/platform specific UI bugs -- if the app starts, it will render the same. There might be some GPU issues, but that's not due to the framework itself.

Electron apps often fully share codebase with the Web apps, so on the app backend you implement native functionality and communicate with your app via IPC.

I would expect most trouble to come from complicated features like the audio stack or canvas, as well as system integration, not aesthetics.

That does not answer the question.

The question is not if Electron feels better for developers because it renders consistently.

The question is if that matters. Is it a big issue? Does any user actually care?

I care, for sure. Electron apps have been better than tauri apps so far, from what I’ve used.

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