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Mozilla and the burning need for clients for power users (www.theregister.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

23 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Mozilla seems to be asleep at the wheel, when it once drove online activity and communications. We have some suggestions where it could go.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Personally I think they should revive Positron, their electron competitor, with the launch of Servo. If it has the same benefits of Firefox vs Chrome, I think people would love apps that are on the slimmer side

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't see the point, especially when there's Tauri, which is a slim wrapper around whatever the default web view is on the target platform. That's about as slim as you can get.

Mozilla making it would merely be a Firefox-based Electron competitor, which would probably end up being similar in terms of size. I think that should happen, but the goal shouldn't be to make apps slimmer, but to make a real Electron competitor (i.e. something that packages the browser with the executable).

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I've never heard of Tauri before. It's almost exactly what I would hope for from mozilla, and perfect for some of the apps I want to make. Ty!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You're welcome! I'm actually in the process of pitching it to my company to replace our Electron app, which has caused a bunch of problems for us.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you have a pros and cons between tauri and electron? Thank you

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I'll just describe how they work, and you can decide the pros and cons for yourself.

Electron:

bundles browser with the app, so the dev can control exactly the version of the browser they're shipping
language is JavaScript
quite stable from a development perspective

Tauri:

uses system browser (Edge on Windows, Safari on macOS), so the browser gets updated with the system, not the app
language is Rust
younger project, but it's also a relatively simple project

I want to move our app to Tauri because:

we need to refactor anyway because recent versions of Electron break our app
install size is large, and we could refactor the web app to be offline-ready instead of relying on Electron features
Tauri gets security updates for the browser "for free," so we could have our app "auto update" by just being a PWA
if we add desktop-specific features (e.g. move some of our computation to the FE), it won't be in JS, so Rust offers better options (i.e. threading)

So since we don't need the features Electron offers, I want to use Tauri to reduce our maintenance overhead.