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Here's a real, actual bug that we had in the old Slack for Mac app (which was Webkit-based, so effectively the same approach as Tauri et al) - some users, only

Here's a real, actual bug that we had in the old Slack for Mac app (which was Webkit-based, so effectively the same approach as Tauri et al) - some users, only on older versions of macOS, report that whenever they paste in a YouTube link, the embedded video has a pink tint. Tell me, how would you fix this bug?

saagarjha 2y ago
(I assume you’re talking about loading Slack in the website? That’s the only WebKit surface you have that I know about.) Let me turn the question around for you: why do you think shipping Electron will save you? Sure, maybe WebKit has a broken video decoder this year. What will you do next time when it’s the GPU driver? You already know what the answer is: you diagnose it as far as you can, report it upstream, and communicate the best you can with your users. You seem to have the mindset that every bug exists to be fixed, and that’s not true at all. They are all a tradeoff. It’s easy to go “oh if we bundle everything ourself we can shift more control to ourselves to fix bugs because more of the components are ours”. First of all, you actually have to do that: turns out plenty of companies operating at scale are unable to do that (have you looked at how often Discord updates their dependencies?). And even when you’re committing to doing this and follow up, you have to understand that you’re unconditionally shipping a worse experience to all your users in the hopes of solving saving some time for some small fraction of them. This isn’t something that I am completely against (for example, I advocate for shipping debug symbols to users-but that’s another long argument) but you also have to look back at yourself and go “ok we’re shipping 98% of the same code across platforms and supporting macOS Mojave takes an extra 2 engineer-days a year, maybe this is an OK state of things” rather than being absolutist about something you’re not achieving anyway.
- whartung 2y ago
  > why do you think shipping Electron will save you? All of the videos will be pink, not just the macOS ones on an older Safari. At worst someone could dig into the Webkit (Chome?) distro and fix it and they can release a custom build for the short term before it gets incorporated, fixing "everyone".
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    I am confused by your response. Did you take into account the part where I was talking about bugs in layers under Electron?

saagarjha 2y ago

(I assume you’re talking about loading Slack in the website? That’s the only WebKit surface you have that I know about.) Let me turn the question around for you: why do you think shipping Electron will save you? Sure, maybe WebKit has a broken video decoder this year. What will you do next time when it’s the GPU driver? You already know what the answer is: you diagnose it as far as you can, report it upstream, and communicate the best you can with your users. You seem to have the mindset that every bug exists to be fixed, and that’s not true at all. They are all a tradeoff. It’s easy to go “oh if we bundle everything ourself we can shift more control to ourselves to fix bugs because more of the components are ours”. First of all, you actually have to do that: turns out plenty of companies operating at scale are unable to do that (have you looked at how often Discord updates their dependencies?). And even when you’re committing to doing this and follow up, you have to understand that you’re unconditionally shipping a worse experience to all your users in the hopes of solving saving some time for some small fraction of them. This isn’t something that I am completely against (for example, I advocate for shipping debug symbols to users-but that’s another long argument) but you also have to look back at yourself and go “ok we’re shipping 98% of the same code across platforms and supporting macOS Mojave takes an extra 2 engineer-days a year, maybe this is an OK state of things” rather than being absolutist about something you’re not achieving anyway.

whartung 2y ago
> why do you think shipping Electron will save you? All of the videos will be pink, not just the macOS ones on an older Safari. At worst someone could dig into the Webkit (Chome?) distro and fix it and they can release a custom build for the short term before it gets incorporated, fixing "everyone".
- saagarjha 2y ago
  I am confused by your response. Did you take into account the part where I was talking about bugs in layers under Electron?