Today I Learned about Tauri [1], a framework similar to Electron but instead of spinning up its own Chromium-based browser instance, it uses the system’s available web renderer through the WRY library [2].
Hat tip to @jbz for linking to this comparison between Electron and Tauri [3] from someone trying to migrate an existing app (Dolt Workbench) [4] to Tauri.
[1]: https://v2.tauri.app/
[2]: https://crates.io/crates/wry/0.33.0
[3]: https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2025-11-13-electron-vs-tauri/
[4]: https://github.com/dolthub/dolt-workbench/?tab=readme-ov-file
Tauri seems like a good idea in order to save disk space and maybe some memory, since some of the memory can be shared with your browser, if it uses the system's available web renderer (a big if, many people doesn't).
But it means making the application depend on the whims of OS updates and force the developer to spend much more time testing, and solving more bugs, since there is not one runtime to test, but many. I think that is the main reason most of developers are not ditching Electron for Tauri.
I think the main reason Electron and Tauri exist is because of shitty OS support for PWAs. If it were good, we could install all kinds of HTML5 based apps from the web with minimal resources, but since it isn't, developers are forced to deploy gigantic installers and make their apps devour RAM.
I haven't tested Tauri; maybe the test issue is no biggie; but as a developer, more time testing and more bugs are time not developing features and likely a very likely reason to project failure. It's not something to be taken lightly.
