firefox is only about 200MB less.

“Only” is doing some heavy lifting there. 200 MB is a lot, both in absolute and relative terms. It means Firefox is a full third smaller.

Regardless, that’s absolutely irrelevant to the point that this app’s size is explained by Chromium’s (and thus Electron’s) size.

Tauri has been a thing for a while, it baffles me people still choose Electron without a good reason to do so.

Also webapps are just great nowadays most OS support install PWA's fairly decently no?

ffs

Tauri is not as platform-agnostic as Electron is because it uses different web views depending on the platform. I ran into a few SVG-related problems myself when trying it out for a bit.

For example, on Linux, it uses WebKitGTK as the browser engine, which doesn't render the same way Chrome does (which is the web view used on Windows), so multi-platform support is not totally seamless.

Using something like Servo as a lightweight, platform-independent web view seems like the way forward, but it's not ready yet.

> Tauri is not as platform-agnostic as Electron

I suspect the real reason electron got used here is that ChatGPT/Copilot/whatever has almost no Tauri example code in the training set, so for some developers it effectively doesn't exist.

>on Linux it uses WebKitGTK

It's about time Linux desktops adopt some form of ${XDG_WEB_ENGINES:-/opt/web_engines} convention to have web-based programs to fetch their engines as needed and play nice with each other.

It has: /dev/null /s

We're talking about a MacOS App. Platform-agnostic is irrelevant.

It's relevant in the broader context, cross-platform is a significant reason people choose Electron, and lighter alternatives like Tauri still have some issues there.

seconded -- tried to use tauri for a cross-platform app but the integrated webview on android is horrendous. had to rewrite basic things from scratch to work around those issues, at which point why am I even using a "cross-platform" framework?

I imagine if you stick to desktop the situation is less awful but still

> Tauri is not as platform agnostic as Electron is

Found this a few months ago: https://gifcap.dev/

Screen recording straight from a regular browser window, though it creates GIFs instead of video files. Links to a git repo so you can set it up locally.

Thanks, didn't knew about Servo, hopefully we'll get there Electron really is bloated and any app using it eats my ram whatever how much of it i have

> Also webapps are just great nowadays most OS support install PWA's fairly decently no?

I would say no, and some are actively moving away from PWA support even if they had it before.

Plus, electron et al let you hook into native system APIs whereas a PWA cannot, AFAIK.