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Comment by GardenLetter27 | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why people like Tauri - the fact it uses the system web browser completely destroys the main advantage of Electron: that you can test it locally and be absolutely sure that it will render like that on any other system since the browser is shipped with it.

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For a lot of people the main advantage of electron was just being able to use the webdev stack for a desktop app. Tauri makes it less portable but is less bloated. Different tradeofs I guess.

Also: I think it’s kinda funny that Tauri is basically a very straightforward of example of trading developer comfort for benefit of the user, and you can’t imagine people using it.

Indeed. It's sacrifices engineering cost for customer experience.

I have never seen a Tauri app that was significantly less bloated than Electron. Can you share any?

The bundle size is, by definition, much smaller as it doesn't include the browser engine.

It's not for the benefit of the user when you get dozens of issues in Github because webkit-gtk or WebView2 changed something.

If you stick to good old HTML5 with CSS3, without cutting edge Blink-only features, you should be safe.

> the main advantage of Electron: that you can test it locally and be absolutely sure that it will render like that on any other system

That's not the main advantage of Electron. The main advantage of Electron is being able to use web developers to build your desktop software cross-platform for much cheaper.

There's an entire separate copy of Chromium attached to every single goddam Electron app I install. It's completely insane. It's not at all worth the consistency you point out. Far too high a price.

The Tauri team is doing God's work. Electron was a fine enough idea, but I can't wait to see it improve or die. Imagine Electron supporting cross-compilation for mobile OSes. They won't close that particular gap with Tauri any time soon.

I have drafted a photo gallery app in Rust / Tauri, using a JavaScript framework in the frontend. The backend can read directories and files directly, and because the backend and frontend are in a single process, the backend simply passes a file handle (path string possibly) to the frontend. In contrast Electron has to send the image file between processes. I started with Electron and I think that was the point I shifted to Rust / Tauri; seeing the images display immediately was a revelation. Rust / Tauri has the advantages of a desktop app, and I have the option to use the frontend as a web app also.

This Python binding (pytauri) is interesting too - I have colleagues with Python functionality they want to surface on the web, and this would give the possibility of running as a desktop app also - good for large datasets.

The times of browsers having weirdly different rendering behavior are mostly gone, in my experience. I'm sure ~98% of Electron apps that expect Chromium would render just fine/same under WebKit as well.

because most Electron apps are not that complex. Just few forms with some buttons.

Tauri also provides an experimental Servo web engine to follow Electron: https://v2.tauri.app/blog/tauri-verso-integration/

You mean the laziness of developers to write standard Web code and rather help Google in their plans to take over the Web?

Do we have an open source Playwright for multiple mobile browsers?

I agree. I don't mind VS Code or some app a person did eats 300 MB of RAM and is Electron if it does the job done. By the way good luck implement something like rtl, i18n, text select and right click context menus in you favorite C/Go/Rust/ImGui/ImmediateModeWhatever library.

Wanna switch between Arabic, Chinese, English in a textarea or input or the whole app? Trivial in Electron. Again, good luck with that in any other environment.

Electron is superior for any text/form apps. HTML/CSS/JS are truly magical if you dive deeper and for any form-like classical type of crud apps there is really no better option.

With our computers getting more RAM and disk space every few years - especially compared to AI needs, Electron is actually super lean compared to those AI llms models. Funny enough, LM Studio is an Electron app ;)

> With our computers getting more RAM and disk space every few years - especially compared to AI needs, Electron is actually super lean compared to those AI llms models. Funny enough, LM Studio is an Electron app ;)

This is a phenomenally bad take. This is exactly the thought process that has led to the insane software bloat problems we're dealing with now (with Electron as one of the worst offenders).

> good luck implement something like rtl, i18n, text select and right click context menus in you favorite C/Go/Rust/ImGui/ImmediateModeWhatever library.

> Electron is superior for any text/form apps. HTML/CSS/JS are truly magical if you dive deeper and for any form-like classical type of crud apps there is really no better option.

I don't think you understand what Tauri is.

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