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Comment by leleat | Hacker News Reader

> Shared CEF runtime across apps. Every app currently bundles its own CEF copy. A managed shared runtime would drop binary sizes to a few MB per app. On the roadmap.

This[0] sounds interesting. I am not familiar with CEF, so I wonder how the versioning works. When different apps require different versions of CEF, do we just essentially end up with the electron model where every app bundles their own browser (just slightly less bad). Or is there still an advantage to a "shared runtime" in that case?

[0]: https://docs.deno.com/runtime/desktop/comparison/

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In case anybody else wondered CEF is the Chromium embedded framework.

https://github.com/chromiumembedded/cef

The biggest weakness of a framework like Tauri is the choice to target system webviews instead of bundling a browser runtime.

It seems great to be able to cut hundreds of megabytes out of your app installer, but the platform differences wind up being a complete and ongoing pain in the ass.

Tauri support on Windows is phenomenal.

Tauri on Mac runs into lots of WebKit/Safari issues, especially on older Mac machines that have an older engine that doesn't support modern web APIs. Your app can crash or be left non-functional. You'll find out about these runtime bugs in the wild randomly, and patching for some customers can take days, if not weeks.

Linux support is hellish, and it's best to not even try targeting Linux with Tauri.

Tauri is in the process of adding CEF support. It should probably become the default build target for all platforms.

I use Wails which is Tauri but for Go and I don't have the kind of issues you're mentioning. Maybe that is a difference between Wails and Tauri but I don't think the system WebView is a significant factor.

Are any of your Mac users using an 10-year old WebView? We frequently ran into that. And there's nothing that can be done about it except engineering around it.

I also doubt it works well on Linux. The performance of webkitgtk is like running an emulator inside an emulator.

Can you either at build time or runtime specify a minimum macOS version? No one running macOS 26 (for example) is using a 10 year old WebView.

But a lot of people are still running macOS < 10.15

Regular Tauri app (aptakube) user on linux here: the experience is very adequate and smooth, I have no complaints. Speed benefits relative to Electron (similar app: K8S Lens) alone are enough to deal with many possible issues.

Could be attributed to app developers going the extra mile, but I suspect it's the framework choice.

Targeting and building Tauri apps for Wayland, specifically, is a massive headache due to assorted webkitgtk bundling/incompatibility madness.

Web developers already have to deal with different browsers, versions and API coverage.

The beauty of shipping a desktop app would be to not have to deal with that though… also those built in web views are usually older than average.

This point of view always confuses me, because web developers already need to deal with platform differences. Especially if your app app also runs in a browser, like Slack and Discord — at that point, what issues do the differing system webviews cause that you don't need to deal with anyway just targeting browsers?

It's also funny to me as someone who's been building websites for 20+ years at this point, because the platform differences used to be much, much worse. Coincidentally, I just saw this article, which makes the case nicely: https://www.bram.us/2026/06/21/do-websites-need-to-function-...

webkitgtk isn't just quirky, it's also much slower compared to more popular browser engines and is particularly bad with RAM usage.

is webkitgtk different than the engine used in safari?

Not necessarily? As far as I know they come from the same WebKit source. But the bridge between WebKit and the OS is of course specific to each system. WebRTC is still experimental in webkitgtk while caniuse says Safari supported it back in 2017.

I remember encountering one bug with Final Form that triggered rarely in Safari, 100% in Webkitgtk, and never in Chromium.

Here's the developer of Tauri saying it's hard to recommend webkitgtk / Linux support:

> So if you need good linux support now/soon i can't 100% recommend tauri (for Linux) as of now. (I used to be more "forgiving" but with webkitgtk getting worse/more unstable each release i changed my mind)

https://github.com/orgs/tauri-apps/discussions/8524#discussi...

> This point of view always confuses me, because web developers already need to deal with platform differences.

On Mac, I use Firefox and Chrome.

However, if I use a Tauri app on Mac, I have to use dated WebKit. It's out of a Tauri developer's control.

> On Mac, I use Firefox and Chrome.

Sure, but many people use Safari, which runs that exact same WebKit engine under the hood. So if your app is available in the browser in addition to Tauri, you have to support it anyway. And at the very least, you as a web developer should be used to supporting it.

Many people run older versions of Mac OS X (because their machine won't upgrade), so their safari is aging -- they use an alternative browser, firefox and chrome support older mac os x.

Of course using unsupported OSes isn't the best idea, but Apple give you security updates longer than they give you 'fun' safari updates.

Sure, and many people also run older versions of macOS and also use Safari.

The platform webviews are significantly older/worse than typical web browser versions, especially on macOS and Linux.

On macOS, the only way to upgrade your WebView is to upgrade your OS, which requires rebooting. Lots of people just don't bother. You can upgrade to the latest Chrome or Firefox just by downloading it (assuming they support your macOS version), and they auto-upgrade themselves pretty aggressively.

On the web, very old versions of Safari (6+ years old) are a tiny fraction of a percent of your traffic; many web developers just ignore them. In a desktop app based on a WebView, ancient WebViews can be as high as 10-15% of your macOS user base. Ignoring them is not an option.

On Linux, it's common for the major version of WebKitGTK to not upgrade at all except during major OS upgrades. Anyone on Ubuntu LTS 20 is going to have a 2020-vintage WebKitGTK with security patches. (And Ubuntu LTS 20's WebKitGTK was buggier than macOS WebKit, even in 2020, because Apple has more dedicated full-time developers and testers making sure that macOS WebViews work end-to-end.) If you're shipping an app based on WebKitGTK, you can expect to see double-digit percentages of your Linux users running really old WebKitGTK.

Maybe you're such a great developer that your web app works great on ancient browsers, but, if so, it's probably because you didn't need/use much JS in the first place. (Maybe you used HTMX or something.) In that case, is there even any benefit in shipping a "desktop app"? What's your desktop app even for? Offline support? (But your app is all server side…?)

If you have a JS-intensive app that works great on ancient, buggy browsers, then platform WebView might work for you. It's not nobody, but it's hardly anybody.

Yes, we're used to platform differences, but that's kind of the benefit of shipping a desktop app, isn't it? So that we don't have to deal with the platform differences. If you bundle the browser, then that ought to all go away. No graceful degradation necessary, no polyfills.

LOL , then back to electron. I raised that since day one of Tauri.

Tauri's cef-rs is indeed quite good. I think it's available, ready, works: it's just that there aren't many folks using Tauri and only a fraction of them are aware/interested in exploring further. https://github.com/tauri-apps/cef-rs

Huge fan, this should definitely be the default. The user experience is incomparable.

One thing I'd like to verify: can the OS effectively use shared mem for cef across multiple different cef-rs apps? I really hope so. In this time of RAM being scarce, this optimization could be such a benefit.

Or use QtWebEngine which uses Chromium under the hood, provides a stable and rich API and enables sharing rather then bundling the browser runtime + is Cross-Platform + security updates are handled too.

> It seems great to be able to cut hundreds of megabytes out of your app installer

Your points are valid, but the big upside is that the default system webview is very likely to already be loaded in memory before your app starts. And if multiple apps use the default system webview all of them will load that same dynamically linked binaries only once.

I don think the RAM savings are that significant on modern systems, but it greatly speeds up app first-loading times.

I used CEF for a project and Google is detecting CEF via some opaque algorithms and not allowing logins from it. From https://security.googleblog.com/2019/04/better-protection-ag...:

> Because we can’t differentiate between a legitimate sign in and a MITM attack on these platforms, we will be blocking sign-ins from embedded browser frameworks starting in June

Granted this was years ago, maybe the situation improved? I had to abandon my CEF project because of this.

Most apps (on desktop or mobile) open third party auth flows inside the user's default browser, which makes this a non-issue. For one, if you embed the Google login flow into your app then I can't reuse my existing session in my browser. But it also exposes my full credentials to your app for no reason, which is a good thing to avoid.

I doubt the benefit. Practically every Electron app on a desktop uses different versions of Chromium and many are very out of date because of the risk of breaking when upgrading.

People build web apps for an array of browsers and huge ranges of versions. I think if you started using some tech to deploy an end user program and knew from the beginning the browser could be updated beneath you it would work just fine. But if you start with a golden version of Chrome and put off updating for too long you’ve let yourself get too comfortable.

> People build web apps for an array of browsers and huge ranges of versions.

en masse they don't. They just target the latest Chrome

De facto they do because functionality built three years ago and tested then is running along side functionality they built yesterday and tested on today’s Chrome.

People also do seem to test on iOS Safari because that pain in my ass needs special care on my software. So if a site works on it they either got lucky or tested on an iPhone. It’s generally only other people’s weird tech demo stuff that doesn’t work.

I agree and disagree, you can't target everything, but most (not shit) devs will target at least Safari - 1 or 2, simply because the iPhone market is too good to miss out on. And Safari being, well, Safari, means targeting that is a pretty safe bet for anything else.

Depends on the region, no one where I work has an iPhone or a current Mac, so stuff gets tested on FF and Chrome, and Safari gets thoughts and prayers. We would test on Safari if it were simple, but alas.

Skipping testing on 15% of all devices to save $600? Sounds like a poor business decision.

15% of devices is not 15% of users. From my own experience having a web app that is 99% desktop windows users, why would I care about safari?

Maybe for your app, it doesn’t make sense. And if it’s a pure enterprise app, fair enough (assuming it’s an enterprise that was started more than 15 years ago and only targets regulated or very specific markets). But a good way to guarantee that your app will never go beyond Windows desktop users is to ignore the most dominant mobile platform by users who actually pay for software.

Well, if your app doesn't run on Safari, you're not going to have any users on Safari.

My logs tell me what they try to use. It’s not safari. Also they are paying users and would tell me if it didn’t work on their browser. The demographic I target is 99%+ Windows users.

We are a very small company, and have always had far more Firefox than Safari users. And though they get by via dominance, IE style bundling of the browser to the OS is toxic, so good riddance.

I target IE6 and it just works everywhere

You could, but by targeting a specific Electron app the mindset would be much simpler. Just take a look of how many times does the dev behind VS Code decide to upgrade their Electron/Node.js version, and how many breakages due to them.

It is all about unknown unknowns.

Just to let you know, CEF was used for Riot and League of Legends client as well [0]. The results haven't been nice, but I'm not aware if this was a problem with the CEF technology itself or other component/processes are to be blamed.

[0]: https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/architecture-league-client...

When the new client was built, microservices were the hot new buzzword.

The new client is some weird plugins/services based architecture. Things that'd barely warrant their own class in a boring OOP-based UI framework are instead now "isolated" services. The reality of this isolation being that if one piece breaks, the whole UI becomes unusable anyways. Dozens of things that in another app would've been just a simple synchronous call now behave like remote procedure calls and messages, forcing all the complexity of distributed systems into a local application for no reason.

That's why it runs like ass, breaks if you look at it wrong, and your CPU draws more power when using the client than when playing the game at 200FPS.

This is more a function of how mismanaged the project was at Riot (the iron client days, choosing Ember, etc.) which led to the current state of the launcher.

CEF is + has been the de-facto standard when you have a native app and want to do a web UI.

It's not the only option, but it's the most mature with the largest amount of docs + stack overflow questions, so it's a "safe" choice.

If you peek into the native resources files of most games/desktop apps, you'll find a good portion of them bundle + use the CEF dll.

I regularly install and uninstall the league client on Mac based on how I play that game (require fresh installs to raise the playing cost) and their client really sucks. Even freshly installing it, the client inhibits and hijacks mouse clicks from the full screen game when it's open. It took me months to figure out I would have to minimize the game, open and minimize the client (separate app) open, and then clicks would sometimes properly return.

Before that I was closing both and playing a game of roulette. By the the time my game was working, I may have already been reported for being afk and the game ended. Edit: other bugs have included starting to download the game and then signing in afterwards (their UI doesn't stop you) and then download progress disappearing, perhaps hanging, and you having no way to know it for a 40gb file unless over an hour has passed and you check disk size and then realize the client doesn't know how to load it. Start over and do a fresh install again, clear cache etc because their cache of the client still thinks somethings being downloaded even though it's not. Also having chat permanently off, results in weird glitches with friends requests and being unable to add new friends.

Horrible experience. But since the game is so optimized for addiction and dark patterns these days, and sunk cost, its a game I find myself returning to every once in a while.

On the gaming side, last I checked Steam's client was using CEF too and it doesn't get widespread blame for anything.

No shortage of games using it for in-game browser stuff, too.

Both Steam and Battle.net use CEF for their UI as well. And IMO they are on 2 ends of the "nice to use" from the implementation side (Steam being a sluggish hell and B.net being nice). Though then again B.net is only for Blizzard games, so they can also optimise for the limited set games.

> Steam being a sluggish hell

news to me. Been using steam since it launched. Never noticed it being sluggish

You haven't? Steam has been a miserable experience for years. Great way to make a monster gaming rig replicate the eMachines 1998 experience.

I'm so sincerely glad that 28 years later I get to spot hate for eMachine in the wild. What an absolute piece of shit. I remember buying one and immediately returning it and to this day... you get it.

Also Spotify. I believe Spotify was one of the earliest adopters of CEF, maybe the first major adopter?

The desktop app was originally a native C++ app, but they switched to CEF around 2011-2012. (It caused a very noticeable drop in performance!)

Web devs are used to their target being evergreen, so I suppose you could opt in or out of that model: "just give me what you got".

> Web devs are used to their target being evergreen

I would think/hope web developers are used to “just give me what you got”. Any other mindset leads to “you must install <browser> to see this site”.

It’s Electron devs that are used to that.

I love how we’re now reinventing the browser as a much worse version of itself. What if instead of one or two general Web browsers we make everyone install 10 random versions that can only open one website?

> Web devs are used to their target being evergreen

Since when? The browser landscape is much better today than 10 years ago, but no web dev worth their salt assumes anything about the user agent.

True for this decade, but in the previous decade it was very much the opposite. Before you used any kind of browser api or nice language feature you would feature-detect it:

    if (typeof Array.prototype.includes === ‘undefined’) { …

And if it wasn’t there you would define it yourself, it was called “polyfilling”. This was so commonplace that we built significant tooling like babel to standardize feature detection tests and fallback implementations - for a few years you could write

    request.then(response => response.json())

And behind the scenes the Rube Goldberg machine would turn this into something that would run in a JavaScript environment that had neither arrow functions nor promises.

Oh god I feel OLD reading this.

I'd prefer if it just used the system webview rather than downloading and managing an embedded browser itself. Webview2 on Windows for example.

> Small by default, full Node compatibility. The default WebView backend uses the operating system's own webview for small binaries

That appears to be the default, CEF is available if required (hint: it shouldn't be).

A strip down version of electron TBH.

System WebView but Electron is now the system

Ah, that's a new systemd module now.

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