A while ago I saw someone mention that Tauri would soon also just include Chromium, because in practice using a native webview loses a lot of the ostensible portability of a browser-in-a-desktop app (they claimed native webviews can differ a lot between OS's). Maybe that was overly pessimistic
> because in practice using a native webview loses a lot of the ostensible portability of a browser-in-a-desktop app (they claimed native webviews can differ a lot between OS's)
OS Webview fragmentation was my concern from the beginning, but got pretty much shushed away by tauri proponents. Funny how after years they also came to the same conclusion that a webview running on win8 and one on linux do not necessarily render/behave the same, and the amount of bugfixes/normalisation one would have to include is just to vast.
Still it might make sense if you exactly know the OS distribution of your user base.
For a lot of basic applications that do not need a lot of the extended browser APIs, Tauri is an amazing option. Consistency isn't really required in a lot of use cases. You just want things to work, you have a small team and Tauri works perfectly.
Some Linux distributions still dont work smoothly. If you could optionally choose to bundle verso just there I think its a great cross platform option.
Is there something specific to the browser-in-a-desktop app domain that's different from normal frontend web development, where you have to support a variety of different browsers? How is it any different for Tauri?
The different bit is that if you decide to include an entire engine with your app, you don't need to support a variety of different browsers.
Most people that go into browser-in-a-desktop app want to also provide a web app, so the difference is moot. But there are certainly a few people for whom it applies.
Probably you saw my rant. We are small team, rust shop and we shipped Tauri for a couple years to more than 20k users. Our application is complex and we had a lot of unpleasant debugging to do due to differences in native webviews. Linux performance was just plain bad. We switched to electron, far from ideal but overall the right decision for us at least until Tauri allows bundling of a stable browser.
