WebViewFeedback VS webview

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

You can create the webview using each platforms native GUI toolkit and setup JS communication yourself OR you can use a lightweight library that does it for [1] (search its README for language "bindings").

[1] https://github.com/webview/webview

Each platform has it's own webview control available as a shared library installed with the OS.

MacOS has WKWebKit based on WebKit.

Windows has WebView2 based on Edge/Chromium.

Linux has webkit2gtk based on WebKit.

Tools like Tauri use a simple cross-platform single-header abstraction called webview.h[1].

Electron no longer allows Node.js to be called from renderer processes, all communication with Node.js is done via IPC.

In this case, why do we still need Electron? Why does it have to be tied to V8/Node.js?

The fact that Chromium Embedded Framework exists and is third-party makes me think that Chromium wasn't designed for being embedded, and Electron is filling that gap.

This is elucidated here further here https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2:

> it's difficult to reuse their work...if another WebKit-based application or another port wanted to do multiprocess based on Chromium WebKit, it would be necessary to reinvent or cut & paste a great deal of code.

It makes me think that perhaps WebKit was the better choice for embedding. The fact that Node used V8 made Chromium the choice, and that Node being called from the renderer was the original way of working. Maybe because WebKit didn't have a build for Windows was an issue too...

But now that we have Bun, perhaps it's time that WebKit becomes that browser target of choice for desktop apps on macOS.

Unless WebView2 for macOS arrives, which would have a more sane cross-platform story. WebView2 has a very large feature-set though which make take a while to implement for macOS.

[1]: https://github.com/webview/webview/blob/master/webview.h

Nui could base on this in theory. Nui uses https://github.com/webview/webview under the hood, which provides browser windows for linux, windows or mac. Nui adds some cmake to make the "in-browser" and "main-process" part appear seemless, as well adding a DSEL for the "in-browser" view part.

WebView 7k

You mean something like this?

Golang can compile to windows statically, and on Windows those bindings are using the MSWebView2 API (aka Microsoft Edge webview).

I know that you can also compile the webview.cc into a dll specifically, and link against that. But I'd never done with Visual C++ because I am cross-compiling from Linux to Windows.

The README of the webview/webview project refers to the WebView2 SDK on NuGet, however [1]

[1] https://github.com/webview/webview#windows-preparation

The author shrugs off web tech (maybe because of electron bloat?) but you can avoid the bloat by using each platforms native web browser control. There are even cross-platform libraries that make creating the native control and cross-communication simple. These applications would be architecturally similar to Win32 apps using and communicating with a XAML Island, but the advantage of web tech is it's an open standard and WPF/WinUI is not.

For example, you could use a native webview (Edge WebView2 for Windows and WebKit for MacOS/Linux), which uses much less RAM than Electron.

From a more established company with more guaranteed long-term support than the web frameworks that solve the above problems (like Tauri and Webview)