Comment by diath
1 day ago
Too little too late now that the new meta is to use system provided webviews so you don't have to ship a big ass web renderer per app.
1 day ago
Too little too late now that the new meta is to use system provided webviews so you don't have to ship a big ass web renderer per app.
System web views were available as drag and drop components in VB6 two and a half decades ago. There's nothing "new" about that as a concept, and plenty of reasons to not want to use Blink/WebKit.
> System web views were available as drag and drop components in VB6 two and a half decades ago. There's nothing "new" about that as a concept
We are in a thread discussing a Rust library, logically, I was referring to the current approach in GUI rendering in the Rust space (such as Tauri and Dioxus).
> and plenty of reasons to not want to use Blink/WebKit.
Such as? Can you name a few objective reasons against Blink/WebKit (the technology) that does not involve just not liking Google/Apple?
Tauri/Dioxus aren't necessarily the end state of Rust GUI
> the current approach in GUI rendering in the Rust space (such as Tauri and Dioxus).
Tauri itself doesn't render web views. It uses wry under the hood. Dioxus isn't a web view at all and deserves a fundamentally different purpose.
> Can you name a few objective reasons against Blink/WebKit (the technology) that does not involve just not liking Google/Apple?
If you have a cross platform application, it sucks having to worry about which features work or don't work based on which engine is available and how old it is. You also don't know if there are user scripts being injected that are affecting the experience. It's impossible to debug and many users don't even know what browser engine is being used, they just know your app doesn't work.
If you build for Servo, it works exactly the same on every platform. You could use wry and test that Edge is good on Windows, WebKit works on the past few versions of Macos, gtk WebKit works, etc etc, or you can just use Servo.
Not to mention, Servo is probably much lighter than whatever flavor of chromium the user has installed under the hood.
No particular reason Servo couldn't one day become the system web view on Linux distros...
Linux (GNU/Linux or whatever) doesn’t even have the concept of a system web view. The closest you might get to the notion is probably WebKitGTK which is perhaps the GNOME idea of a system web view, but it’s nothing like WebKit on macOS or WebView2 (or MSHTML in the past) on Windows for popularity or availability.
As a user of a desktop environment other than gnome-shell, I only have webkitgtk-6.0 installed because I chose to install Epiphany—it’s a good proxy for testing on Safari, which Apple makes ridiculously expensive.
Yeah the closest thing you come today is arguably WebKitGTK, which is known for being not exactly great.
That is not the meta. The meta is to ship blink so you only have to support a single version of a single web engine in stead of many versions of many different web engines.