this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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Firefox

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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]
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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] 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.