[tomkarho]

The big appeal for me was that Tauri didn't ship an entire Chrome browser to make it work. It never even occurred to me to gauge the webview used in such detail.

> On Linux, Tauri not only ships its own webview, it's also an old and fundamentally broken webview

I'd love to hear some details on this. What is Tauri shipping now and what should it ship instead?

[franga2000]

I agree, that's the biggest appeal. But on Linux, there isn't really a "system webview", so they use webkit2gtk. Most systems happen to have this installed as a dependency for something else, so it's a reasonable choice.

The thing is, that library is based on an ancient version of webkit, which is slow and lacks some modern web features. There are some open issues about it and the response is "yea, we know, we're doing the best with what we have", which is fairly reasonable.

A secodary complicating factor is that the main "universal binary" for Linux is AppImage, which by design requires you to ship all the dependencies. So you end up with the eorst of both worlds: you're still shipping an entire webview with every app, just like Electron, while unlike Electron, which is based on recent Chromium, the webview is based on outdated Webkit.

There have been some attempts to bundle CEF (basically Chromium) instead of Webkit and there is also a testing branch that uses Servo, but those only solve the second issue.

Ideally, the Linux ecosystem would standardise on a webview implementation and Tauri could link to that, just like they link to Webkit on macOS and Edgeium on Windows. It could be based on Blink (Chromium) or Gecko (Firefox) or even better, it could be just a standard interface and the use could pick their implementation. But since the Tauri folks would be the first and for a while only people using it, they'd probably have to do most of the work themselves.

[tracker1]

Might help to have a companion app that uses the same embedded webview that is nearly indispensable at least for gui distros... something akin to MS Compiled Help (CHM) ... which I always thought was a pretty great idea.

I mean... it'd be a trip down the MS route, but maybe working with the Cosmic devs on this one... getting a baseline webview in place at the core, tooling support for help, email, etc. Getting Cosmic, Gnome and KDE all on board would be a massive boost and cover most users.