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> It does not embed a browser, so it is resource efficient. Instead, it uses the native rendering engine for the platform. On Windows, this is the new Microsoft

by iasay 4y ago

> It does not embed a browser, so it is resource efficient. Instead, it uses the native rendering engine for the platform. On Windows, this is the new Microsoft Webview2 library, built on Chromium. How does this make it magically resource efficient? It's still another Chrome tab running some inevitable pile of inefficient excrement that burns watts. It's just not shipping it with the package. Disk and bandwidth is cheap compared to watts and latency which is the biggest problem with any web based technology. I just want my native apps back (and no I don't want wx/Qt/Gtk!)

doodlesdev 4y ago
If you're using Linux GNOME then GTK IS native, same thing for KDE and QT. wxWidgets uses native system components on all operating systems (and provides both GTK and QT backends for Linux). I agree that applications that are made for a single operating system are generally more appropriate because they feel better, but I don't feel it's realistic to expect from any company developing software simply because there's so many permutations of different systems to support. If you're developing for Windows for instance then "native" depends on the operating system version (win32 > uwp > winui3). Also using the system webview (compared to loading a whole dedicated browser just for the application) in my experience is better when it comes to application bloat in the runtime, Tauri for instance achieves half of the memory usage that a Electron application needs and it's also possible to reduce CPU usage significantly by offloading any computations to the Rust backend. I'm not saying I'm satisfied with the situation, just that I don't expect that anyone cares enough for truly native applications to become relevant again.