Hacker News Reader

Comment by livre | Hacker News Reader

Not much different but enough to be dangerous. Older Windows use Trident, 10 still uses EdgeHTML, many people are stuck with old Androids that don't have up to date engines (not sure if Android is a target, wasn't easy to find in their website), and webviews have access to the system in ways a website doesn't (like reading files or using the camera without having to ask for permission or being allowed to issue requests to arbitrary domains).

View on HN

But we know from web statistics that these are very few people and shrinking every year.

That is not how it works on Windows, as you have to ship either the Webview2 runtime or installer with your app - otherwise you’re stuck with the old rendering engines.

At which point, it’s just easier to ship Electron.

Shipping Electron and bundling the WebView2 runtime are practically the same level of difficulty.

Making an installer is not that hard, and you should have enough respect for your users' compute resources to go through the modicum of effort it takes.

>Making an installer is not that hard, and you should have enough respect for your users' compute resources to go through the modicum of effort it takes.

No. As shown by the slew of other comments in this thread, it's not just about getting the runtime to load. You still have other issues involved.

You should have enough respect for your own time and money to ship the product and not open yourself up to a litany of cross-platform issues. Your job is not to fix OS vendors failing to get a common UI framework in place.

Signed, someone who has literally dealt with cross-platform-webviews in a shipping product in the past six months, and who builds native Mac apps.

Tauri's Bundler will automatically take care of shipping the Webview2 runtime, so there won't be any extra work required of you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com