Comment by lukevp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lukevp | Hacker News Reader

One of the main problems I see with tauri is that system web views just aren’t a great solution for a ui framework. Partly because Linux doesn’t have an official webview implementation, partly because the web views across OS versions have differences (eg. Tauri on Linux had a benchmark saying the boot time was 20+ seconds because of the webview, and win 7 and I think even early versions of win 10 do not use the edge webview).

This is a lot of tradeoffs for saving 100 megs.

I understand that we should be good stewards of our customers’ hardware and not waste things unnecessarily, but also have to balance that with shipping something and not worrying about all the edge cases. Most people in developed countries have Internet connections of 100+ mbps, which means the app will still download in <10 seconds.

Does electrobun support using an embedded chromium for the renderer? I went to the project readme and it was really unclear if that’s a currently-supported option and if so, how to use it.

> Instead of distributing Chromium, By default Electrobun uses your system's native WebView (WebKit on macOS, Edge WebView2 on Windows, WebKitGTK on Linux).

still:

> Optional CEF: bundle CEF (Chromium) when cross-platform consistency matters most.

from: https://blackboard.sh/electrobun/docs/guides/what-is-electro...

“System's native webview as renderer, CEF Optional”

Taken from the product site (not this blog post) that was linked by another user. So you get to choose it would seem.

On Windows I noticed for my Tauri app I had to use this https://v2.tauri.app/distribute/windows-installer/#embedded-... (https://github.com/kzahel/jstorrent/commit/10cc1c53#diff-f61...) even on a new windows 11 install for the webview to work, but my app seems to work fine otherwise on all platforms (I only tested Ubuntu desktop though, ha).

Electrobun sounds really cool, glad to see there's more work done to enable cool desktop apps without Electron.

Why don't any of the major distros have a webview? Seems an obvious move if you want apps and alongside user experience, apps are the biggest barrier to linux adoption

There may not be an official webview, but all (?) major distributions have libwebkit2gtk, which is used by Wails (Go) and Tauri (rust). So it's a de facto standard if not official.

https://webkitgtk.org/

https://wails.io/docs/gettingstarted/installation/

https://v2.tauri.app/start/prerequisites/

There is a ton of work going into a Tauri based on CEF. https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/tree/feat/cef

My hope is this still acts like a library that multiple Tauri instances share. That would still have the upside of Tauri's shared library architecture (boo statically compiled programs, what a waste of precious ram!) while still letting us have a viable runtime. First app load might not be lightning fast but second app load is hopefully faster!! The OS webviews range from mediocre to absolute garbage; this to me would be a great improvement, that makes me happy!

A Tauri app built on CEF (Chromium) is very similar to Electron (which also uses Chromium). The key difference is that Tauri uses Rust for the application’s business logic, whereas Electron uses JavaScript.

In this case I don't know why I should use Tauri instead of Electron.

My understanding is that the tauri CEF will use shared libraries where-as every Electron instance has its own copy of Chrome.

That's the whole point of my post: we get a relatively up to date Chrome and we get a shared library that all Tauri apps can share! Hence why I discussed why running n+1 apps should have lower overhead.

So it seems much much much better than Electron to me. Electron values the app developer, wants to give them assurances that the chromium is the exact specified chromium version, and bundles it. I get it, the world is complex and clamping down is a natural response, but this conservatism has given Electron its deservedly bad reputation, and Tauri's slightly shifted stance alleviates so much pain.

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