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Comment by 20after4 | Hacker News Reader

Is there really no way to get around the webview2 installer? Why not package it in your app bundle somehow instead of installing it as an external dependency?

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> Is there really no way to get around the webview2 installer?

WebView2 supports both the auto-updating "Evergreen" version and a fixed version[1]:

In the Fixed Version distribution mode, you control the timing of updates to the WebView2 Runtime for your app. You download a specific version of the WebView2 Runtime and then package it with your WebView2 app. The WebView2 Runtime on the client isn't automatically updated.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/co...

For me personally, I was trying to avoid bundling an entire browser runtime, so I viewed that approach (bundling WebView2's runtime instead of downloading on demand, only if needed) as no better than using Electron. At the time, that also wouldn't have solved my "Linux support" problem, but the blog post author is using webivew (which uses WebKitGTK on Linux), so that might not be relevant to them either. At which point I have nothing relevant to say!

I made an attempt at using WebKitGTK on Linux to build a WebGL game a couple of years ago. I was basing it on some existing code that I had already done a ton of work with to optimize and make cross-browser compatible. Had basically 99% feature parity between Chrome and Firefox.

Lack of standards support in WebKit made it painful to use and even meant losing major features like VR support. WebKit and WebKitGTK were both extremely unstable in their own ways. And I never could figure out a decent debugging scenario setup.

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