From what I understand, this project attempts to implement a subset of the Electron API so that the library can act as a "drop-in replacement" for simple enough Electron apps. If this understanding is correct, then I think Electrico has the potential to significantly boost adoption of Tauri.
For those who don't know: Tauri is a collection of Rust libraries that allow using an operating system's "native web view" (WRY) and a Rust backend for the process backing a web view (there is an IPC layer between JS and Rust). The overall result is that, on Mac OS and Windows, one can distribute native executables without needing to bundle either Node.js or Chromium. There is no startup cost of loading Node.js, since a native Rust binary is used. As for the web view itself, startup tends to be faster than Chromium, since the libraries for e.g. WebKit are usually pre-loaded by the OS itself. Tauri apps have near-instant startup time, and I've found it to be a joy to use. The only downside is that the backend must be written in Rust. Electrico seems to help soften the learning curve by providing JavaScript APIs mirroring that of Electron.
Overall, nice project.
Isn’t that just a randomly abandoned version of something of uncertain origin, on average? Why would one want use it? I guess to save distribution space.
I don’t have a “top”-deps itch, but using an arbitrary webview sounds compatibility hell even to me.
There is still a long tail of versions you might encounter when using a (security supported OS), but for most Linux distros, macOS, and Windows the worst case in the long tail is now just 6 months behind. (You lose security support if you don't keep up with semiannual OS releases.) If you have reason such as a corporate overlord to also support LTS OSes the worst case is closer to 2 years depending on Unix distro. (Windows WebView2 remembers IE and still requires regular update cadence even on LTS Windows, so WebView2 on today's LTS Windows should still be closer to the 6 month mark than the 2 year mark if following Microsoft's LTS policies, staying within support, and not paying for more complicated LTS contracts.)
It should be very easy with caniuse/MDN statistics to write web apps for any browser of the last six months. If you plan to support macOS you still need to support two (related like siblings) renderers as macOS wants you to use WebKit/Safari and everything else is Chromium in one way or another today, but testing on two browsers shouldn't be a showstopper for many (most?) apps. There are definitely Chrome-only APIs that might appeal to you in building an app, but at that point many of them you can polyfill with a native dependency (a Rust dependency in the Tauri world).
On both Windows and macOS, the "OS webview" is just a framework binding to the OS-shipped browser (i.e. Edge, Safari); and both Edge and Safari get updated with pretty much every release of the OS (which, in turn, are kept up-to-date in a pretty pushy way these days by Microsoft and Apple.)
Also, in both of these cases, by relying on these OS webviews, you're "sharing" the renderer and other global context with the actual browser (if the user happens to use it), and with all other OS webviews on the machine — rather than each new app needing its own renderer and global context, wasting 1GB+ of memory per app and creating thousands of redundant files on disk for the app's own cache et al.
It's really a pure win vs. Electron for these cases.
On Linux, what you get depends on the distribution format. If distributed as a package, you get a dynamic binding to WebKitGtk — which requires the package manager to resolve and install this (and that might not work, if the distro doesn't ship that package.) If distributed as an .AppImage, you get a vendored-in copy of WebKitGtk — which is basically the same as what you get from Electron.
You encounter the exact same compatibility issues you would on the web, with a somewhat slower uptake to new versions. Not ideal but entirely manageable.
> why would one want to use it
Primarily because (last I checked, anyway) any app using Electron has to bundle its own version of Chromium, which is massive. It also means each Electron-powered app is totally ignorant of the other, resulting in a lot of duplication and unnecessary memory usage. When you use the system webview you have minimal bulk and resources can be shared, as if they’re multiple tabs in one browser rather than each one being its own browser.
Personally I'd agree with this. I'd also include saving the RAM of loading an independent version of Chrome for every electron app would be nice. Last, I never understood what version of chrome gets bundled with these electron apps. Is it more or less secure than WRY?
A bit less uncertainty via: https://v2.tauri.app/reference/webview-versions/
So there is no cross-process communication, true synchronous communication between browser and nodejs code, ability to communicate without copying memory and without serialization, etc. All these capabilities are essential if you do a lot of processing between the two sides. It is also why electron must bundle a browser (and its v8 engine) and can't rely on the OS browser like other solutions do (which might not be v8 or might be the wrong version of v8).
From my understanding this is not the case of any other WebView wrappers tech (Tauri, Wails). Which makes them unsuitable for some kinds of applications (invoking a function cross-process is extremely slow).
I am not sure how correct I am with these claims as I never did a lot of electron. If you have a deeper insight I am quite curious about the topic.
I don't think renderer processes run Node. Per the documentation,
[C]ode ran in renderer processes should behave according to web standards ... [T]he renderer has no direct access to require or other Node.js APIs
That is not correct: https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/tutorial/process-mode...
> So there is no cross-process communication, true synchronous communication between browser and nodejs code, ability to communicate without copying memory and without serialization, etc
From the Electrton docs:
> Arguments will be serialized with the Structured Clone Algorithm, just like window.postMessage, so prototype chains will not be included. Sending Functions, Promises, Symbols, WeakMaps, or WeakSets will throw an exception.
(https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/api/ipc-renderer#ipcr...)
But yes they do build pretty heavily on Chromium, so swapping it out for a system WebView would probably not be possible.
See here, search for "Topic 12": https://syntax.fm/show/821/is-tauri-the-electron-killer/tran...
This seems very overlooked in your evaluation.
>Wry also needs WebKitGTK for WebView.
WebKit have a lot more security problems and compatibility issues and are not as updated as chromium based, electron.
There's nothing wrong about chromium based engines like electron. They are just a little bigger for download a little slow to start but that's it. If your code is well developed they are fast and snappy. Discord is one good example also vscode
One of the example is audio playback. Chromium and in turn Edge WebView2 have great support, but make it work in Webkit2gtk is a big pain in the *s. I then decided to switch the audio playback feature to Rust side (using Kira and Symphonia) instead.
Having Chromium bundled eliminates all the pain about inconsistency between webview engines, and using Rust means we don't have to pay for the NodeJS size in our app bundle (plus better performance).
For Tauri, I think something like Servo will fit well as bundled browser engine. Hopefully some day it will happen.
I like how Linux is so important it gets two mentions, but Windows is left out. Presumably that's a typo though?
Only supports ARM Mac at the moment but windows and linux support coming soon.
Someone may ask why - simply to have options. Tauri is great but there are many users complaining (with justification) that relying on the platform webview sucks, especially on Linux.
In general, there’s no reason Electron can only have a Node API.
Ship a web application, or write actual native apps. Electron and that flavor of “app” development is the worst of all worlds.
Just like the JavaScript web frameworks have turned what should be small web applications into huge monsters — Electron has made what should be relatively small, high performance applications into these bloated resource hogs.
I get it, JavaScript developers want to be part of the fun and there is definitely a use case for tiny resource-constrained startups still changing product-market fit. But companies like Slack for instance — worth billions of dollars and can’t find a way to write a high performance desktop app in Swift for MacOS instead opting for Electron.
Think of the climate! All that extra power required to run these resource hog Electron apps on tens of millions of computers isn’t trivial, not to mention a neutered user experience that results from not taking advantage of actual native applications.
JavaScript isn’t the panacea people want it to be.
Electron makes it easy for companies but it makes it rougher for the victims.
And Tauri and all the others are simply different flavors of the same shit sandwich.
Only a couple of browsers supported that version of Manifest.json. Chrome developers thought it was too much of an 80/20 solution and decided to get deep in the weeds of the 20% instead of delivering the 80% solution while they worked. That's what got us the way too low level and hard to reason with Service Worker APIs for PWAs. It's over-engineered for the 20% of use cases in a way that makes "easy" 80% so much harder than it ever should have been. Chrome developers still randomly promise the web that the "easy high level API" will arrive any day now, but looking at the mess that is Workbox (their team's supposed-to-be high level building block library for Service Worker PWA APIs) it still doesn't look like it will happen any time soon.
It's more the shame because we briefly had a simple JSON manifest format for assets. That JSON format should have been easy to emulate in the Service Worker APIs if those APIs truly were meant to solve the problem, not just solving more interesting problems in a related space that a minority of use cases needed. Google doesn't currently have enough incentive to make PWAs easy to build, and as long as Chrome is the majority browser, Google is the major obstacle.
It could be feasible if software communities didn’t tend to underimplement features and then solve them by intertwining all sorts of dependencies and their maintenance policies. For example, for as controlled thing as typescript, there are at least four popular ways to “just run” projects, all with different quirks and issues (tsc & node, ts-node, swc-node, tsx). Although it was obvious that people would want to run and watch .ts files based on tsconfig.json, without an explicit compilation step.
e.g, it took Igalia getting involved to move more things to the GPU when other platforms more or less had that by default already.
https://blogs.igalia.com/carlosgc/2024/02/19/webkit-switchin...
Especially webkitGTK is just a drama, it's barely able to do layout for basic tables in a performant manner.
In my experience in the current implementation Tauri is not ready for production. I've seen some preliminary work by the Tauri devs to investigate if they could use some standardized webview engine, but that's still very far away.
That is big engineering task and not something a small group of devs can do.
Only thing that could comes close is building electron and chromium compatible api on top of Zed team's UI engine.
Discord constantly downloads huge updates and vscode uses too much memory (not counting LSP) for text editor.
VSCode use as much memory as you add extensions. I agree it uses up memory but Jetbrain and Fleet performance is also as bad if not worse then vscode and they use alot more mem.
If u want vscode as just text editor Just disable all the included default extensions.
In practise I will take any JetBrains IDE or VSCode over native XCode IDE anytime - XCode is such a big heavy hog.
One of the things that actually made me interested in Tauri in the first place was their 1.0 Release[0] which included information on just how much CO2 output would be saved by switching from Electron to a similar Tauri app (600Mb vs 3MB)
Of course you're right that if, instead of using Web UI in the first place, companies went straight to native apps then there'd be even more savings to be made -- but there's trade offs to be made with regards to aligning OSs and reusing components and onboarding engineers and writing good cross-platform tests when working in native that just aren't there when working with a WebUI, and something like Tauri which has many of the upsides with fewer of the externalities of Electron should be applauded at least as a step in the right direction.
[0]: https://tauri.app/blog/2022/06/19/tauri-1-0/#environment
The only thing is that Tauri apps seem to be quite easy for the developer to botch and end up with performance problems. One of the worst performing apps I ever used in my life was a Tauri app.
Now, I have grand visions for an embedded servo renderer that can be driven using native compiles rust, not JS. But who knows if we will get that one day
There was also a recent HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41221252
But building three separate codebases in comparatively niche GUI frameworks full of platform-specific quirks when you could achieve 95% of the quality with a single JS/TS codebase comes across pretty terribly as a business decision. It's hard to justify what is likely a 10x-ish cost multiplier with "it uses less RAM" or "the scrolling feels more natural". While large companies can afford it, the cost-benefit still doesn't look good to them.
I think web apps/Electron apps may be a factor in reaching the year of the Linux desktop.
A big reason people choose Electron is so they don't have to deal with all these differences.
I'd say that's generally true with web-based UIs. It's possible to create web UIs that perform fantastically. But you have to know the platform and be disciplined, and it's easy to mess it up.
Could you give some examples? This seems like a potential security risk.
App Name: Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer.app Electron Version: 25.8.4 -n File Name: /Applications/Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer.app/Contents/Frameworks/Electron Framework.framework/Electron Framework -e App Name: MongoDB Compass.app Electron Version: 30.4.0 -n File Name: /Applications/MongoDB Compass.app/Contents/Frameworks/Electron Framework.framework/Electron Framework -e App Name: Obsidian.app Electron Version: 25.8.1 -n File Name: /Applications/Obsidian.app/Contents/Frameworks/Electron Framework.framework/Electron Framework
And to answer your question: yes this is very much a security issue. There are many unpatched versions that are vulnerable to webp exploits, including chat apps (with the serious implications of that being obvious)
Web devs shouldn't be allowed anywhere near native APIs.
One big reason people go for delivering their web apps through Electron is so they can guarantee that they are on a specific modern version of Chrome. This is something you lose with Tauri. You gain some tighter memory consumption, but you do trade one thing in for another.
For some value of "modern", usually "horrifyingly outdated".
I think the median Android device out there in the world today — just by sheer volume of them produced — is probably a "Welcome" phone with a MediaTek 6580 chipset and a faked-capacity SD card; i.e. hardware that couldn't possibly run any Android version made in the last six years.
(Such phones could in theory run Android Go... but they often don't, because these devices are often running non-Google-Play-Store AOSP derivatives — and there's no un-Googled version of Android Go.)
The main process really shouldn’t be used for anything except setup. Since it controls gpu paints amongst other things, blocking on it will cause visible stuttering and a bad user experience.
https://www.electronjs.org/blog/electron-internals-node-inte...
Makes sense.
The other main difference is Electron bundles a known set of APIs, given the known Chromium version. There’s such a huge variance of supported features across the embedded web views.
But it is right that the ui for elwctron has to use a IPC layer to get a node backend running. However, chrome is moving a lot of things like FilesystemAPI into browsers so there may be a day were nodejs is dropped in favor of a sandboxed chromium.
Source: https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/api/structures/web-pr...
I am pretty disappointed about this, it severely limits the usability of native code from inside the UI code and makes Electron much less attractive compared to Tauri, Wails or similar alternatives.
Do you know if at least moving objects between the electron processes uses direct memory-copying and not some heavy-handed serialization (Wails for example serializes to JSON). The links you pointed out don't mention that.
https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/api/structures/web-pr...
Separately the IPC lets you do zero copy in some circumstances via Transferable objects such as ArrayBuffers. Structured cloning is efficient but not zero copy, and json serialisation shouldn’t be used (since structured cloning is easily available).