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by Sytten 839 days ago
Been using it in production for over 2y, expect a lot of complaint from Linux user. Webkitgtk is really behind in terms of performance, standard support, etc. And it is not on MDN compatibility list so good luck finding what is available. It is to the point where we marked it as experimental for our users and considered switching to electron (we didnt yet).

Also you can expect hard to reproduce bugs on X version of Y OS that are not reproducable anywhere else. It's a PITA to maintain even for people used to the pain of cross browser problems. Just yesterday I got a user on macos 12 reporting not being able to write in some input fields, no error in the console. Now I need to figure out how to have a VM of that macos version with the specific patch for the webview version to match to reproduce, nightmares I tell you.

Otherwise it is decent and we are a rust shop so it makes sense for us. But IMO it is impossible they will gain any market traction in bigger businesses until we have standard webview packaged into the binaries like electron.

4 comments

Thank you very much for sharing your experience. I am developing on macOS so I have yet to face the Linux issues, but I have already faced a few issues on macOS, that require editing some plists file (switching media outputs for example), which made me "sigh" a couple of times.

In Electron, I got my fair share of Linux issues, but nothing critical (tray appearing twice, this kind of things).

This is the Electron paradox: this is the best platform to develop cross-platform apps, because it just works. Yet people hate it (for valid reasons).

I feel like I've seen mention of them looking at Servo long term - but don't quote me and please someone correct me if I'm wrong.

WebkitGTK being so lackluster is indeed a problem - I ran into this of all things in a wxWidgets project. Eventually wound up ripping it out and replacing it with custom screens since it was more work to maintain and work around issues than to just sit down and write the UI.

WebRTC! in webkitgtk soon!

:/. Glad I stopped holding my breath, I would have have died several times.

i think for such case Tauri should allow to embed engine like chromium blink for cases like windows 7 or xp.
Does MacOS not have an equivalent of the Linux AppImage build that bundles the webview?
Am I to understand this correctly that you can effectively ship Tauri-Chromium on Linux?