> 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 engin

> 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.