For our use case don't care too much about the kind of webview it uses and would be fine with shipping a larger binary. Servo integration could be interesting to have one known webview to target if cross-platform consistency ever becomes a challenge
This does make it closer to Electron. We'll see whether Servo can be made leaner or faster (Servo is focused on GPU-based rendering).
Long term, I dream, there could be tighter integration between Tauri and Servo's DOM, so that UI changes won't have to go through JavaScript.
In theory yes you could go outside Linux as well, like maybe bsd? Or which ones are you thinking of?
It has trade offs in terms of memory usage and binary size, but Electron has already conditioned users to expect every todo and chat app to be 500mb on disk and use a gigabyte of ram at idle. In other words, if Electron would make sense for your project, but you want to use rust, this seems like a good fit.
It was a talking point for angry at clouds people.
It was never a selling point, because nobody cares how big apps are today. For a regular user with a 256/512 GB drive, even if they had 50 electron apps 1 GB each, it would not matter in the grand scheme of things.
So yes, using a WebView might decrease your memory usage by 30%, maybe 50% for small apps. Not a huge game changer, maybe it would make a 8 GB RAM laptop more usable.
The lowest hanging fruit when it comes to societal good that you can do as a programmer is writing software that is also usable for people with less money for hardware. And a lot of us don't even bother
To me piggybacking on the system webview is the main selling point. Tauri-made bundles usually clock in at a few MBs, compared to 100+ with electron.
Also check out Wails if you'd like something along these lines with Go substituted for Rust
The things that have been frustrating are the documentation, the variety of options (pick a front end framework, pick a build tool), and the sense of being on your own once you get Hello, World! working. I wish there were more examples with using 1+ different Rust web service frameworks, how to manage state, and so on. It has the feel of an older-style open source project where the developers are in love with offering options rather than committing to a strong developer experience.
I can vibe-code up some basic UI but it all feels a bit precarious.
I understand it also has experimental support (possibly still under development?) for a servo/verso render engine, which is why I mention it.
Reminds me a little of the topic of range anxiety in BEV adoption: verso integration might be the hypothetical range extender trailer whose existence could help BEV adoption even if it was hardly ever used.
Even if it has to be bundled, having the equivalent performance accross OSes is big. Tauri is definitely piquing my interest again because of this.
I imagine most users will continue using Tauri with native webviews. But if consistency between different webviews ever becomes an issue you now have the option to ship a Verso webview to have more cross-platform consistency
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.
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.
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.
https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/discussions?discussions_...
Trading UIs demand snappy performance, and a rust powered rendering engine like Servo could mean faster DOM updates, better security, and lower resource usage
I'm just curious, has anyone benchmarked Verso’s rendering speed vs. Wry? And how’s the webrtc support looking? Low latency comms are a must for us.
Excited to see where this goes!
[0]: https://cycletop.xyz