Bit of a hot take, but I basically expect that most new Rust GUI projects will be written in Tauri before long.
It works on multiple platforms, and is flexible, and it's easier to find off the shelf pieces due to the web technology involved, and it's lighter than Electron. It's a no-brainer for me (and others, I think) if I'm starting a new GUI desktop project.
Hopefully, not. From my personal experience, Electron and alike applications are slower, larger, and in general have less advanced UI than many Qt or GTK-based (or Windows UI) applications. Nothing can beat good old native GUI frameworks.
Note that I did not make performance claims relative to native!
The “use Qt/GTK/etc” is quite a common refrain on hn, and while I agree all these projects just have not achieved the DevEx that anyone is looking for.
Electron/Tauri and even flutter are easier, and that’s why I think they will win.
AFAIK the real problem is accessibility features which are lacking. The wasteful resource use will be essentially fixed as computers get faster/hold more data, and more devs put even minimal effort into resource usage.
Tauri uses WebView2 on windows, I believe, which should have the same text rendering as the Windows 11 start menu and Edge itself. You may be thinking of older IE-based webviews, which were used even well after "old edge" webviews were introduced because "old edge" webviews weren't supported on windows 7 or 8.
Is there something blocking Tauri from switching to WebView2 on Windows? It's based on Chromium, so I assume most of the legacy web view issues would be irrelevant.
IIRC, WebView2 is supported going back to Windows 7...
It works on multiple platforms, and is flexible, and it's easier to find off the shelf pieces due to the web technology involved, and it's lighter than Electron. It's a no-brainer for me (and others, I think) if I'm starting a new GUI desktop project.