This point of view always confuses me, because web developers already need to deal with platform differences. Especially if your app app also runs in a browser, like Slack and Discord — at that point, what issues do the differing system webviews cause that you don't need to deal with anyway just targeting browsers?
replyIt's also funny to me as someone who's been building websites for 20+ years at this point, because the platform differences used to be much, much worse. Coincidentally, I just saw this article, which makes the case nicely: https://www.bram.us/2026/06/21/do-websites-need-to-function-...
webkitgtk isn't just quirky, it's also much slower compared to more popular browser engines and is particularly bad with RAM usage.
replyis webkitgtk different than the engine used in safari?
replyRegular Tauri app (aptakube) user on linux here: the experience is very adequate and smooth, I have no complaints.
Speed benefits relative to Electron (similar app: K8S Lens) alone are enough to deal with many possible issues.
replyCould be attributed to app developers going the extra mile, but I suspect it's the framework choice.
Targeting and building Tauri apps for Wayland, specifically, is a massive headache due to assorted webkitgtk bundling/incompatibility madness.
replyI use Wails which is Tauri but for Go and I don't have the kind of issues you're mentioning. Maybe that is a difference between Wails and Tauri but I don't think the system WebView is a significant factor.
replyAre any of your Mac users using an 10-year old WebView? We frequently ran into that. And there's nothing that can be done about it except engineering around it.
replyI also doubt it works well on Linux. The performance of webkitgtk is like running an emulator inside an emulator.
Can you either at build time or runtime specify a minimum macOS version? No one running macOS 26 (for example) is using a 10 year old WebView.
replyBut a lot of people are still running macOS < 10.15
replyWeb developers already have to deal with different browsers, versions and API coverage.
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