wry VS qtwebkit

The biggest benefits we derived from Tauri were Wry and the sidecar mechanism. Wry (the second half of Tauri: tao/wry) is a cross-platform WebView rendering library in Rust that supports all major desktop platforms like Windows, macOS, and Linux. It essentially spins up a native web view from whatever operating system it’s running on and doesn’t require an application to bundle one with it. Wry greatly reduces the overhead of “pushing” a browser to our users, instead leaning on the host OS to handle rendering a web view. This made our applications really lean.

Check out https://tauri.app/ - specifically, https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry, which provides a cross-platform interface to the system's WebView.

Tauri uses WebkitGTK, which has pretty bad performance compared to other browsers on the same hardware.

https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry/issues/890#issuecomment-14...

One small note regarding Native Webview meant above. You can find ultimate information on this topic here. In a nutshell, Tauri applications use as HTML renderer Webkit (safari engine) on MacOS, Microsoft Edge WebView2 on Windows, and WebKitGTK on Linux (port of Webkit for Linux). Pay attention to the fact that a Tauri application could behave differently on different platforms according to the information above.

wry looks like a better choice, but no one has bothered to work on this task, yet.

I think this might be somewhat close to what you're looking for: https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry

They're wrapping the Android webkit/webview stuff in wry and creating an activity for it. I imagine they've already achieved or are close to achieving full parity API-wise to proper Tauri desktop apps.

Another way to approach it is to wrap the web app in a webview and use Tauri for custom logic, see https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry. You'd need to teach yourself some Rust though. I'm sure you could achieve something similar with Express. The performance will be similar to using a browser so not terrible.

It uses the WebView that the underlying OS provides to render the application’s UI — this is one of the reasons why the application binaries are smaller (as compared to electron). The WRY library from the Tauri toolkit provides a unified interface to interact with WebViews provided by different operating systems. The WRY library uses the Tao crate for cross-platform window management.

Not so ancient - Otter uses QtWebKit 5.212 from Mar 10, 2020.

AFAIK, Otter Browser uses the latest QtWebkit-ng on Windows. It scores 341 points in HTML5Test. There is also an experimental Qt WebEngine backend.

The main backend for Otter Browser is QtWebkit Reloaded, last updated in 2020, see the screenshot.

As for Otter Browser, there is a bug in QtWebKit. Try using Otter Browser on Qt WebEngine.

Otter Browser is based on QtWebKit-NG, which is from 2020, so still relevant. That said, you can use the nightly WebKit build from Playwright: https://i.postimg.cc/Fz7FwRQW/Playwright.png

Lastly, the other webkit based project, QtWebkit. It is also very lightweight and fast, It also provides a cross-platform render and It has access to the system dialogs. The down side is that you will have to make a Qt App to use it. If you don't want to implement it, then you cannot use It

> I hate that it's based on Chromium though

There aren't really many alternatives. The main one is WebKitGTK, but that comes with its own set of issues (mostly performance/compatibility). You can use qutebrowser with QtWebKit as well, but I wouldn't recommend it - it's based on a 2018 WebKit with many known security issues: https://github.com/qtwebkit/qtwebkit/releases

I had hoped for Servo to fill that gap at some point, but so far that hasn't happened yet: https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/27579

Another possibility is for Geckoview to be ported to Desktop platforms some day: https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/ - something the people behind Tridactyl would like to happen: https://tridactyl.xyz/ideas/#port-geckoview-to-x86_64

> and Qutebrowser privacy related settings also seem quite limited compared to Firefox... (and even compared to Chromium.)

Can you be more specific? Pretty much anything that's possible to expose (either via a QtWebEngine API or via Chromium commandline arguments) is exposed. Certain things (like deleting cookies belonging to a tab when it's closed) just aren't possible without implementing them in QtWebEngine first unfortunately.

FWIW there's an overview here: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/4045

and Qt has mostly moved to qtwebengine/blink. qt-webkit is sort-of-not-really maintained by very few volunteers. https://github.com/qtwebkit/qtwebkit/releases

While you can still use it with QtWebKit instead, I wouldn't recommend doing so, as that's still based on a 2018 WebKit with no process isolation or sandboxing.