datatraveler

It might even be better than that. It sounds like Microsoft pushed WebView2 to (at least some) Windows 10 computers (N.B. Steam says 32% of users are still on Windows 10).

Of course, the docs still say:

> Even if your app uses the Evergreen distribution mode, we recommend that you distribute the WebView2 Runtime, to cover edge cases where the Runtime wasn't already installed.

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

I wish we knew how prevalent that situation was. Not sure what the failure mode would be. But it sure would be nice to be able to assume that a modern WebView always exists on Windows! That certainly wasn't the case back when I made my decision circa 2022.

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!

If this requires installing WebView2 on Windows, then I'd recommend against this approach. I did something similar myself (to avoid distributing a bloated Electron build), but, since the WebView2 installer sets its window title to "Microsoft Edge Update", I got a lot of negative feedback from a few very vocal Steam users who thought my game was trying to re-install Microsoft Edge--a browser they had meticulously removed all traces of. I think one Steam user even called my (free and open source) game "malware", just because of that window title (which only appeared on first run, when the WebView2 installer ran).

I'm sorry to say that if I had to do it again, I'd use Electron, despite the bloat. I bet Electron would also make distributing a Linux build easier, too. (WebView2 didn't work fullscreen on Proton when I last tested.)

Sorry to be a downer! Obviously, I originally loved this approach since I did something similar--it just didn't end up paying off. No one noticed that the download was ~100 MB lighter--but they sure noticed a brief flash of "Microsoft Edge" on their screen!