We are using system webviews for https://kreya.app (not Tauri, but a custom implementation) and the platform differences are seldom a problem...
Polyfills fix most of the things and we are running automated end to end test on Linux, which catches most of the issues.
IMO the most difficult thing is figuring out how far the users are behind with their webview version, mostly on Linux and macOS. Windows has done thinga right with their WebView2 implementation
On the contrary it is a big big issue if you have a complex web app like we do. It was a PITA to deal with user bugs in a specific macos version with a 8y out of date webview.
And the performances of webkitgtk are horrible on Linux.
That’s a big issue if you can’t set a minimum required version for some reason, same for web apps in general - I rarely find much problems with platform behavior but that’s probably because we just reject out of date browsers.
That's one of the main selling points of Electron: it ships a single browser instead of using the system webview.
The main drawback, of course, is that it ships a browser with every app.
Yeah for a small tertiary apps then Electron is a huge performance burden to put on your users. They might just choose it's not worth it and not use your app.
On the contrary if it's a large app that the user spends lots of time in, then the performance overhead might well be worth it for the user.
Imagine in the first case that it requires a base load of 10 units of energy to run and gives 2 units of output, while in the second it still costs 10 units of base load energy, but now it gives 100 units of output. The base load becomes relatively irrelevant.
Yeah I was wondering how you dealing with the inconsistency of the different webviews? Are you using jquery? Or data star? Or is your own custom made polyfill depending on your user base?
TBH, a lite weight polyfill for most system webview would be refreshing change to all the spa frameworks out there.
Wait - there's system webviews? On Mac, Windows, and Linux?
Edit: It looks like Tauri uses the following platform webview features.
https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry?tab=readme-ov-file#platfor...
This looks fantastic! Any deets on the stack?
The UI inside the webview is written in Angular, everything else in C#.
More on the stack and our initial issues can be read here: https://kreya.app/blog/how-we-built-kreya/#cross-platform-gu... (from 2021)