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> I have an app based on Tauri which is web based, and the msi is 10Mb. It’s never had any perf issues. And that's on the heavy side! Tauri is awesome, it's u

> I have an app based on Tauri which is web based, and the msi is 10Mb. It’s never had any perf issues. And that's on the heavy side! Tauri is awesome, it's unfortunate most developers opt for Electron to reduce the amount of testing needed between browser engines. I agree with you that a well-made web app is snappy and works well. I don't think we'll go back to native apps (for now), what I hope for is simply that it could become an _option_ as right now it's just basically trying to swim upstream. Web apps do a lot of things really well that native applications always had difficulty with, such as accessibility and distribution. Still, I feel that even when doing web apps that are snappy they miss out on some cool features of native applications such as consistent theming, reduced memory usage, reduced CPU usage (regardless of how well the web app is written), and just the simplicity of it. Perhaps the ship has already sailed, and native applications will never make a comeback, in which case I hope lighter weight engines purpose-made for web applications get adopted as an alternative to shipping the entirety of Chromium with each program I download. Projects like Servo [0] show me that's possible, it's just that there is currently no interest from the big players to keep funding these developments and provide them as an alternative to Chromium. [0]: https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/

klabb3 3y ago
> And that's on the heavy side! Tauri is awesome, it's unfortunate most developers opt for Electron to reduce the amount of testing needed between browser engines. The browser engine differences isn’t that big of a deal, because you already have standard ways of dealing with it on the web. I think today the main reasons people pick Electron today are tooling, desktop integration features and Node. Tauri is catching up insanely fast though. I am very happy that I jumped on the bandwagon fairly early. > in which case I hope lighter weight engines purpose-made for web applications get adopted as an alternative to shipping the entirety of Chromium with each program I download Absolutely, shipping a browser engine is insanity and should always have been a stopgap at best imo. Even servo is way too heavyweight to ship with each app. Good news is with OS having native webviews we’re 80-95% there already, so we don’t even have to deal with that tradeoff – this let’s an app have a perf overhead of ~1 typical browser tab. It’ll take a moment to iron out all kinks but it’s already perfectly acceptable on most deployment targets. Honestly, Linux is just as bad when it comes to distribution. Distros have been in some perpetual siloing mindset and have not been able to get behind a decent and unified distribution story. It has nothing to do with web though. > it's just that there is currently no interest from the big players to keep funding these developments The big players have been so awful that even if you disregard the abysmal interop story, distributing native apps is still orders of magnitude more hassle than the web ecosystem. Imo Electron was born as an escape hatch from that disaster, not because frontend developers conspired to eat all the worlds RAM for fun. I absolutely agree that the big players should passively fund projects like servo and tauri. I don’t want them anywhere near strategic decision making though.

klabb3 3y ago

> And that's on the heavy side! Tauri is awesome, it's unfortunate most developers opt for Electron to reduce the amount of testing needed between browser engines. The browser engine differences isn’t that big of a deal, because you already have standard ways of dealing with it on the web. I think today the main reasons people pick Electron today are tooling, desktop integration features and Node. Tauri is catching up insanely fast though. I am very happy that I jumped on the bandwagon fairly early. > in which case I hope lighter weight engines purpose-made for web applications get adopted as an alternative to shipping the entirety of Chromium with each program I download Absolutely, shipping a browser engine is insanity and should always have been a stopgap at best imo. Even servo is way too heavyweight to ship with each app. Good news is with OS having native webviews we’re 80-95% there already, so we don’t even have to deal with that tradeoff – this let’s an app have a perf overhead of ~1 typical browser tab. It’ll take a moment to iron out all kinks but it’s already perfectly acceptable on most deployment targets. Honestly, Linux is just as bad when it comes to distribution. Distros have been in some perpetual siloing mindset and have not been able to get behind a decent and unified distribution story. It has nothing to do with web though. > it's just that there is currently no interest from the big players to keep funding these developments The big players have been so awful that even if you disregard the abysmal interop story, distributing native apps is still orders of magnitude more hassle than the web ecosystem. Imo Electron was born as an escape hatch from that disaster, not because frontend developers conspired to eat all the worlds RAM for fun. I absolutely agree that the big players should passively fund projects like servo and tauri. I don’t want them anywhere near strategic decision making though.