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Comment on WebWindow, a cross-platform webview library for .NET Core

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This is the first I've heard of it. So I can't say much about the project itself. However, by the look of it DeskGap is at least taking the right approach, where as most these other projects (there seems to be a new one every week) miss the mark.

Electron Pros:

1. Consistent JS runtime/API

Electron Cons:

2. Huge distributions (bundling a full browser)

3. No re-use of components (every app is huge)

Electron Pro?/Con?:

4. Consistent rendering / WebKit monoculture

By the look of it DeskGap keeps Electron's biggest pro and solves its two biggest cons. The only "issue" is that there may be rendering inconsistencies. However, given we want to avoid a WebKit monoculture, I see this as a pro more-so than a con.

With that being said Microsoft have themselves migrated to WebKit; so the WebKit monoculture looks likely regardless. For consistency I guess that's even another tick in DeskGap's corner, although it'd be nice if on Linux (for example) it could use Firefox when present.

Carlo is interesting for a similar reason, but perpetuates the WebKit monoculture.

zserge’s webview has been adopted by a bunch of maintainers who made Rust bindings for it. They have forked webview to continue maintaining it, and are now gradually rewriting it in Rust.

https://github.com/Boscop/web-view

Made on top of that is Tauri, a cross-platform webview-based app just like WebWindow. The key differentiator being that they are actually committed to continuous development as they’re trying to get established as an open source company.

https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri

none of these support .net natively

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