WebViewFeedback VS Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI)

You say that being web centric precludes usage on conventional gaming platforms. What about all the games that are PC only anyways? They could use Tauri or whatnot & have incredibly easy time porting to native.

Games such as Battlefield have already used web technology to power much of the game chrome. Taking this a step further doesn't seem like a real constraint. Microsoft themselves are working to extend fast performance webviews to Xbox uwp's. https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/215...

You're also not acknowledging the upside. Plenty of games would love to have an easy-to-make runs-anywhere multi-parryty game. Letting people log in from work or their phone could be a huge advantage to reaching markets. The market of people with access to web browsers is much bigger than the market of console owners!

You're also constraining your thinking to a narrow band in other ways, again ignoring plenty of great potential. Unreal has had huge success gaining entry into all kinds of unexpected spaces; cinema, architecture, events. Engines have a much wider market than just games, and having engines available on a much broader set of modalities than conventional game engines can unlock new use cases. No one's going to build a navigation tool requiring everyone to have a Steam Deck, but if all it takes is a phone then maybe that becomes interesting.

This also seems like an amazing starter kit for education and hobby coders. Wouldn't it be amazing to be able to be a year or two into learning development, and be able to create your own virtual world? That anyone can easily join & access from any device? That potential makes me thrilled.

Maybe this innovation isn't for you & you want to stick to conventional modalities. Fine, great! Don't use this. I for one see a lot of potential & reason for excitement. I think it has plenty of revenue potential, and vast amounts of cool potential.

Drag and drop is still broken in WebView2, so all blazor Maui drag and drop is broken. This is still not being fixed by MS https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/2805

Add Ons or Extensions with WebView2 (WebView2Feedback#98)

FIXED! RPG-254 Unbeknownst to me, Microsoft broke the toolbar on the WebView2 component that Sojour uses for displaying PDFs. The toolbar is now visible again and I have also fixed an odd threading issue, where once upon a time, opening a character sheet used to make that character sheet's window unresponsive for the first click. It's now responsive from the get-go.

Comment on the page point to a few GitHub issues for macOS and Linux support.

Linux: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645...

> Hey all - We don't currently have a timeline for when we would begin this work. Unfortunately it's very unlikely to be soon.

macOS: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/131...

> No updates since @ningccn's comment above. We are continuing to make progress on Mac and haven't begun Linux planning yet.

"Microsoft Teams is getting big performance improvements".... but only for Windows!

Maybe some day we can have WebView2 in Linux[1] and others.

[1] https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645

Got some traction over on GitHub, please post your comments there! Microsoft has acknowledged this issue and is tracking: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/3136

Yep, and edge webview2 uses edge for the most part. Yet there's something specific to the edge webview2 runtime that makes it hard to port even if edge itself is already available on mac/linux. I think it's because it uses some windows specific APIs to expose functionalities that aren't available to regular webviews.

They were planning on maybe releasing the linux port around the end of 2021, as they were prioritizing the mac port first.

But I don’t think even the mac port has been released yet... So it kind of makes sense for the Teams team (ha!) to just not bother with a linux release if the runtime they are developing on isn't even on the release roadmap yet. Though I guess that makes the switch from electron even more confusing.

https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645

I am migrating XF app into MAUI and writing a simple Navigation framework because Prism doesn't work well and I didn't use anything advanced anyway. So, I am surfing the code of MAUI to intercept all the back buttons, etc. I haven't found a single mention of apis related to predictive back "RegisterOnBackInvokedCallback", "OnBackInvokedDispatcher", "OnBackPressedDispatcher", "AddCallback", "android:enableOnBackInvokedCallback" Also I don't see any issue on github that would say "Support Android Predictive back". Only one kinda related https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/8680

Below issue is still reproducing in Maui .net7.0 version also. #10163

Maui is Open Source, MIT License

https://github.com/dotnet/maui

.NET is Open Source

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/open-source

I do share your skepticism of Microsoft, but it looks like the economics and cash flow dynamics have changed drastically after the advent of the cloud.

Microsoft is more focused on getting developers onto its ecosystem and help them with open source projects with the hope that they will use its Azure cloud services and bring in the money.

My skepticism is a bit relaxed now and I have no qualms using .NET.

I hope I am not wrong.

It's a bit of a hit and miss as of today. CLI, back-end and natively compiled libraries (think dll/so/dylib or even .lib/.a - you can statically link NAOT binaries into other "unmanaged" code) work best, GUI - requires more work.

Avalonia[0] and MAUI[1] have known working templates with it, but YMMV.

[0] https://github.com/lixinyang123/AvaloniaAOT / https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/ / honorable mention https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/maui (try out with just true in csproj - it is known to work e.g. on iOS)

While this is the quite endorsed by the community: https://github.com/dotnet/maui/discussions/339

I think the fundamental issue is that desktop Linux is way too fragmented. Not only just GTK2/3 and Qt but you have GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon and then you have X11, Xorg, Wayland...

To be honest, all those craps are why desktop Linux never took off. I'm very safe to say MAUI for Linux will eventually renders components off its own using framebuffer and hardware acceleration APIs such as OpenGL or Vulkan just because of the market fragmentations...

If desktop Linux truly wants to get the attention, it will need to unify. Fixing dependency hell using Flatpak is the right direction.

There is an existing old fork of MAUI for Linux that uses GTK: https://github.com/jsuarezruiz/maui-linux

First I came across this Github issue: https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/9687 - According to this issue, this is a known bug for MAUI iOS, but it works OK for MAUI Android. As I said, I target Android only and I have the exact same issue. It's apparantly fixed with some of the latest versions for MAUI but the problem still occurs to me even with MAUI version:

I saw this and tried to imitate (ofc my lack of experience wouldn't allow me to do it in the exact way). Already found some documentation that allowed to understand better. Thanks for the insigh.

I implemented the Auth controller following this sample code from Microsoft.