alcro VS WebViewFeedback

I've had some success using aclro for a small project, though it's not quite the same as Electron.

I prefer alcro for most use-cases. It uses any Chromium-based browser which the user has already installed and therefore also doesn't need to ship any bloat but at the same time allows you to use modern web features and supports direct interaction between JS-Rust via the Chromium debugging protocol (which the crate handles seamlessly in the background).

For the only real GUI project I ever did in Rust I used alcro which is basically like Electron but avoids the bloat of shipping an extra instance of Chrome by using an already installed Chromium-based browser (which the new Edge on Win10 conveniently is). I liked it quite a bit, mainly because it's very simple and lightweight and I already know how to make nice GUIs quickly with HTML/CSS/JS and they are much more flexible and powerful than most native GUIs. But of course, it's not really an option if you want a professional native-feeling look and/or need it to work without any issues on all systems.

Not sure if this is the ideal solution but alcro might work for this. It's basically a bit like Electron apps but it uses an already installed Chromium browser to avoid the whole bloat of shipping and extra copy of Chrome. I used it recently in a project and it works quite well. I guess it might be a bit overkill for your use case but it shouldn't be too hard to get Chromium to play a video. The only issue is that it requires users to have a Chromium based browser installed but since you seem to be targeting Windows this shouldn't be an issue since it works with Edge.

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