Tauri 2.0 Release Candidate
v2.tauri.appTook a look at the homepage (https://v2.tauri.app/)... and basically have no idea what this is or why I would use it.
Consider adding something more informative than 'Hardened foundation for your web apps', and maybe an 'About' page.
I clicked “Get started…” and saw this:
> What is Tauri?
> Tauri is a framework for building tiny, fast binaries for all major desktop and mobile platforms. Developers can integrate any frontend framework that compiles to HTML, JavaScript, and CSS for building their user experience while leveraging languages such as Rust, Swift, and Kotlin for backend logic when needed.
This ought to be on the front page.
I agree. The v1 front page says this, which is ok but much less clear: “Build an optimized, secure, and frontend-independent application for multi-platform deployment.”
Yeah for sure. Personally I wouldn't click 'Get started...' on anything unless I already know what I'm getting started with and why.
That'll show 'em!
Don't treat the v2 site too harshly - it's in development and hasn't been released yet.
> Hardened foundation for your web apps
The honest description is : smaller faster electron for macos/win/linux/android/ios - written in rust using the OS provided web browser component for tiny binaries. The Tauri developer's focus on security in their marketing is genuine (they have paid for audits) but a little incongruous given what most of it's users want from it which is just a cross-platform UI and/or with a great rust experience.
I have really been enjoying v2 with Leptos with no problems. Ironically the only tricky bit has been setting up permissions for various types of system access (docs are not quite there) but it was simple and made sense once I saw how to do it. I expected a bad experience from the Linux OS web component but it's been excellent in terms of both performance and support on Ubuntu 22.04. The way Tauri can package your app as a .deb or .apk was crazy simple which I also did not expect.
Electron replacement
Hardly, Electron is used to not care about the system it runs in. Tauri Is the opposite, you have to consider the works of system's engine. At least untill they'll offer packing with servo. Then it would be a real rejection replacement.
Both V1 and V2 tag lines fail to describe what Tauri is, but it seems like it's a competitor to Electron, so I'd go with something like:
> (Toolkit/Framework) for building cross-platform desktop application using web technologies. Focused on efficiency, security, and size.
I’ve been using Tauri for an app I’m developing. The Tauri team is super helpful in their Discord channel. Writing everything in Rust, including the UI (using Axum) has been nice. I’m really excited for 2.0 and mobile support!
My app (very beta) https://meshly.cloud
I'm using it for https://mixitone.com originally it was going to be just a web app, but making it work offline was quite compelling. Being able to access NFC card readers with rust code was the clincher.
I wouldn't say the team has been very helpful though. I think I've asked 2 questions on their discord channel. The first the response wasn't unfriendly but they clearly didn't read my message about what I'd already tried and it was along the lines of "just do this as documented here" which was in the message. The second time nobody replied. I self replied with my solutions but no one seemed interested, so it didn't feel like much of a community to start engaging more with.
The testing situation isn't very good. They have an unstable webdriver to try. My existing web code was already covered with playwright tests. I ended up writing a websocket layer to pass all the events and commands to a browser so playwright could drive the browser as if it were a tauri window. I'm happy that I can exercise the whole codebase and share tests between the web app and tauri app, but it's not a great solution. If I were a company making money rather than one person doing a side project I'd love to contribute to the test tooling.
> I ended up writing a websocket layer to pass all the events and commands to a browser so playwright could drive the browser as if it were a tauri window.
I was just about to start doing something like this as well for end-to-end testing. Do you have that on Github or be willing to share more about your approach?
email me using the address in my profile and I'll send you the code. It's not pretty. I needed to vendor tauri too in order to change the visibility of one function.
Nothing says "private mesh app" like signing up for an account.
Thanks for the feedback. I use the accounts to know which device want to be connected. The devices create a mesh network via webrtc. Perhaps, I need to make it more clear why accounts are needed.
Or you could generate device IDs/QR codes for pairing, a la Syncthing.
QR codes would be a great addition. I've even tested out sending the WebRTC offer/answer via a QR GIF (due QR image data limits) to make the connection very private. The account solution was quick to setup for now and allowed me to easily test the network conditions with peers across the US (I'm in Iowa). A QR code solution or some other solution that makes it super simple to connect devices is definitely a priority for the future.
Very cool! Is a Linux version coming?
It's not high on my TODO list for the project, but shouldn't be too much work. I'd give it a try if you're interested. Want me to reply to your comment when I get a Linux version released?
We just finished migrating away from Tauri to Electron for our desktop application after running Tauri for 2 years. We are a rust shop so it makes sense to use Tauri, but I can't recommend it for a startup use until they allow packaging a webview into your build. The amount of time you currently have to spend in debugging each OS/Version combination of bugs is simply untenable. This is scheduled for v3 last time I talked to the devs.
Otherwise good progress, happy to see it!
I also use Tauri for a startup project I'm getting off the ground and I've been extremely impressed. Unless you're doing something extremely non-standard, I'm not sure what edge cases you're seeing. The webviews packaged with modern operating systems are very compliant (essentially Safari on MacOS and Chrome on Windows). The only wildcard is Linux which uses WebKitGTK which does have all kinds of weird quirks (but that's a comparably tiny market sector to begin with).
Using OS WebViews, you also get the added bonus of security updates which you get for "free" with OS updates (otherwise you have to handle these yourself). There have been some RCE exploits in Electron, so it's something you need to keep an eye out for.
Yup this was also our first impression. Wait until you have users (no snark here, but its the reality). We do have around 1/3 of our users on Linux and WebKitGTK is plainly bad.
Our application is complex I will give you that, but it isnt just that. Say you want to use WASM you have to check which macos versions you want to support and check the oldest possible webview (it doesn't get updated at the same time as safari), check which subset of WASM that supported, etc. It really is a nightmare of subtitle bugs that are hard and time consuming to reproduce.
OS webviews in our findings have a way worse update cycle than us shipping a new version of the app.
> Say you want to use WASM...
Using WASM, unless you're doing it for some really good reasons, seems like overkill for essentially a front-end layer. I think of the WebView in a Electron/Tauri app as comparable to the Qt Framework. It's not supposed to do any heavy lifting, and trying to do heavy lifting in JS suggests a mis-architecting of the app.
Using wasm is becoming a very common and practical thing to do, especially with how you can cross compile so much into it.
Unless you're just making blogs and content pages, it's just part of writing web apps now
Only for those with allergy to JavaScript.
It hardly adds anything in performance if there are too many DOM interactions, and if the performance need is due to compute, all modern computers have a GPU.
This is just the reality of web development. You'd have the same issues if you were developing a PWA. Blaming Tauri for this doesn't seem fair. It sounds like Electron is a better fit for what you're trying to do.
I think what Tauri is getting blamed for is the decision to always use the native web renderer, which IMO is fair because that was a design choice they made.
Personally I think the ideal scenario would be allowing developers a choice between: 1. Use the native OS renderer 2. Bundle a specific version of some renderer (most likely Chrome) 3. Use a shared library for the renderer (this gets a little trickier with sandbox-based security models, but allows Tauri to ship a renderer without ballooning the bundle size of each individual app)
As a user, I'd be happy with a combo of #1 and #2. Use the native OS renderer by default, but allow me to install a "known good" renderer if I run into problems. Since it sounds like MacOS and Windows both ship better native web renderers than Linux this would likely be an option mostly used by Linux users, who are on average more willing to poke around in the settings to enable a compatibility option.
Sounds like this is the plan for version 3, right?
I dunno it feels entirely fair since isn’t one of the benefits of Tauri the fact that it uses your system’s existing WebKit instead of bundling a full chromium?
That makes them also use less memory etc.
Right that's the tradeoff. If you need exactly the same environment on multiple platforms and you're willing to pay a high price in memory and disk space then use Electron.
On the other hand, if you can work around browser incompatibilities then Tauri will give you a much less wasteful app.
Choose the right tool for your use case.
Not really PWA will use your browser of choice which is likely up to date. Tauri often is run on system with very old webviews like 6-7 years old.
What system has 7 year old web views?
A lot of people outside rich outside run old computers and like I said webviews usually are the one first released with the OS and dont get updated.
Tauri won't work with those. For example, on Linux, the .deb has dependencies on a version of webview that's not available on Ubuntu 20.04.
Where can I find more information on what subset of WASM is supported on different mac os/safari versions?
Why are you using WASM? Tauri lets you call native Rust code.
Sometimes you do just want to use off-the-shelf libraries for things and not need to re-implement them yourself. If you already have a web app you’re building around, it’s annoying to need to rewrite bits of it - especially rock solid 3rd party libraries - unnecessarily.
Another consideration is that any webview<->native bridge is going to impose some kind of bridge toll in the form of serialization and message passing (memcopy) overhead. You can call into WASM from JS synchronously, and share memory between JS and WASM without copying. Sync calls from webview to Tauri native code doesn’t appear to be possible according to https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry/issues/454
Finally, security posture of native code running in the main process is quite different from WASM code in the webview. I maintain a WASM build of QuickJS and I would never run untrusted JS in real native QuickJS, whereas I think it’s probably safe enough to run untrusted JS in QuickJS inside a WASM container
And abandon the web version of your product?
I've ran into this trying to use OPFS with Tauri. While it works in Safari 17, it's unavailable in 16 for many users.
There's also various UX differences in webviews.
It's all fine though, I'd rather have multiple webviews over a bloated app. Used to developing for multiple environments anyways.
> I've ran into this trying to use OPFS with Tauri.
I also do file system stuff, and I'm not sure why you would even try doing this from JS when you literally have rust at your fingertips (for example, I use the `native_dialog` crate). Just seems kind of anti-pattern-ish, as JS is not really supposed to have any business logic: it's purely a front-end.
It's a React Native app. I have plans to use React Native Macos eventually but I use Tauri to wrap the React Native Web build for unsupported platforms (Linux & Mac) and as a fallback if the native apps don't work for the user.
I use OPFS on web for the SQLite database store. But yes, I will be writing an adapter using Taurus SQLite plugin to solve this in the long term.
Not a huge issue, and wasn't going to be long term anyway, but it did make it go from "you can release this now" to "oh shoot it works everywhere but on mac, now go write an adapter to this 2.0 sqlite plugin with limited docs"
And there's perfectly fine reasons to use OPFS in Tauri, it's a sandboxed file system. You may not want to deal with the native filesystem for security purposes (yes Tauri has permissions, but not sandboxing after-the-fact)
Exactly my own experience. I like rust and I like the package size. But if I was to build this again I would 100% go with electron.
They started working on 2.0 with the docs for v1 in a 10% state. I mostly searched through discord threads for tidbits. It was painful.
Expect the documentation for 2.0 to be at 5% for years.
I found that using Axum and bundling it with the Tauri app was easier than using a front end framework to build the UI.
Have you or your team written about the migration? Would love to read about that more as usually there's a lot to learn from these situations even when you don't make the same move.
We might do it, I don't necessarily want to push bad publicity on Tauri since I want them to succeed in the end :)
That's very understandable. It can be hard to get people to grasp that it's not a versus competition when these migrations happen, it's all about the compromises (and that's where the fun reading is for me, selfishly!)
I upgraded the app I am currently working on from tauri 1.7 to 2.0 by following the guide from here: https://v2.tauri.app/start/migrate/from-tauri-1/
After running the migrate tool (via `bun run tauri migrate`) at the end of the guide, I needed to do the following things to get complete it migration.
- the migrate tool ran rust format on my backend code - which I was not using at that point - and it changed my preferred to 2 spaces to 4, so I joined the rustfmt bandwagon and created a config file with my preferred settings
- run `cargo update` to get the new package versions
- modify `tauri.conf.json` as the structure changed, eg. `fileDropEnabled` -> `dragDropEnabled`
- change some imports, as the functions from client api were moved, this was straightforward
- add the plugins `updater` and `dialog` as that functionality has moved from the core to plugins
- change the code that handles the auto-updating, as the api changed as well, but for the better
- the only thing that tripped me up, was that re-building the project didnt't work due to an colliding filename error, but I found a closed issue at their https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/issues/10192 which pointed me towards removing `rlib` from the crate-type, which solved that issue.
All in all quite a smooth experience, was done in an 1-2 hours or something, not sure.
I've been following tauri for a bit. It seems very cool and interesting but I've always wondered - what are the use cases for putting your app in a webview instead of using the browser? Everything I've thought of would work just as well.
The goal is to make a standalone desktop app with access to local resources, so the question is "why should you put your app in a webview instead of Electron or a native toolkit?"
The answer is that Electron forces you to carry a whole Chrome installation around, which is unnecessarily heavy, and (AIUI) you have a node.js backend giving you the means to touch the actual OS, whereas Tauri lets you write Rust (YMMV as to whether that's an advantage). Both Tauri and Electron let you use a web-based interface instead of mucking about with native widgets, which are a pain for cross-platform development.
Additionally, we don't have to package whole node js thing.
There are many things web browser can technically do nowadays, but aren't great or not supported in all browser.
- File System (Obsidian, Logseq)
- Push Notifications (IM, Social Media, Email)
- USB/Bluetooth (Doesn't work in Safari?)
- Global Hotkeys (Raycast)
- Interfacing with other local Apps (localhost is often blocked)
For Slack & co, being able to be on the native application dock (for the average user) instead of buried in a tab is considered a significant visibility boost.
It’s also something that came about from when web apps on desktop/PWA didn’t have nearly as much reach. With e.g modern macOS support for PWAs you might be able to get away with just the web app now, depending on your target customer.
Sadly instead of having native apps we have "web" monstrosities... each sporting custom "fancy" UI instead of following the OS native style…
Because WinUI and QT are so glamorous and offer a super intuitive development experience. /s
Best part is that neither of those follows the "native style" either. There's no dark uxtheme provided by windows, so Qt falls back to their fusion style. Even the "native" light theme doesn't follow the new "fluent" style so that's also a shitshow.
As for WinUI 3, apps are supposed to bundle it, so if you target Windows 11 and run the app on Windows 10, it'll look all rounded and drop-shadowy instead of flat like native Windows 10 apps. Great stuff.
As someone that is programming since 1986, has multiple native and Web frameworks experiences behind myself, have been back coding Web since 2019, because a lot of developers are lazy to learn how to write portable code.
Not even portable Web code, they rather ship a copy of Chrome, and then complain Google has taken over the Web.
TBH I'd take QT app over any electron/web app... it still looks more consistent and matches the OS. Heck, even Java Swing (IDEA) looks better and feels more native than any electron crap.
IDEA is surely the ultimate gold-plated Swing app. I'm sure JetBrains have had to pour in a huge amount of time and money to get results that good.
Not sure... It's mostly due to used L&F. You have FlatLaf (inspired by IdeaUI). Swing is surprisingly solid platform (though it has it's quirks and sadly it's development virtually stopped years ago)
Spot on, even if I do mostly Web nowadays to pay the bills.
For example a reader app where you can't host everything on the server. My ebooks collection is 1TB big, and my videos are something like 20TB.
Anything that needs os access, to name some things: menu bar apps, clipboard access, file system, multi window, etc etc.
You can do a lot of things in the browser, but usually it's limited (mainly for security reasons). Having it be an app allows you to better integrate with the OS.
I mean there are so many reasons why you would want to do this it's impossible to enumerate them all. Key command overrides are a great example of bad behavior on the web that is essential to UX in a native app. Or mouse pointer control. File system access and other native APIs the browser doesn't expose, or makes a pain.
I have too. I think the big deal is easy to do cross platform + reuse your javascript/css skills for gui + lower memory footprint than electron apps. I'm waiting until I see some major apps done in it.
You build something that needs access to to the filesystem? -> No other choice than a desktop app. (Chrome has some limited APIs around that, but AFAIK only sandboxes ones and not e.g. existing directories)
It makes more of a difference for the end-user then the developer necessarily.
An end-user can continue to use your electron/tauri app for years after a website has long since vanished into the infinite void.
But vunderba you think to yourself and also how did I know what you were thinking just call me the amazing kreskin, "what about a PWA? - you can use that off-line".
PWAs give the deceptive illusion to the laymen that they're installing an actual application as opposed to just a bunch of ephemeral stuff thrown inside the user data folder of the respective browser.
Is it not lighter weight?
Not lighter weight than a website because it is a website. The only advantages are you can ship parts of your app as native code, and you aren't constrained by the browser permission model.
One interesting usecase is that you can run a tauri app without any webview windows just as a system tray icon and only spawn a webview window when necessary.
This kind of makes it way more lightweight but only in some situations (obv. heavily depending on the functionality of the app).
Would this be for a service style app that happens to have a UI when you need to configure it? If so that's an... interesting idea, but considering the UI is less important I'd probably mind it less (as someone who is not a fan of Electron apps).
I built a syncing tool that needed to run in the background with a simple UI to control it.
I used tauri so I could easily make that cross-platform toolbar app.
Some menu items spawn a webview (things like settings), everything else is in Rust.
Can anyone explain what Tauri or webviews offer that makes them a good choice over a local-http-server webapps? Imo, as a user, Webview, no thanks. Local webapps, yes please.
There really isn't a good reason for webviews or electron/tauri that I can tell? Why some people love love love native apps, to the extent they'd rather a dressed up webapps is confusing to me. If it's already a webapps, hell yeah give me the user-agency of extensions, browser history, tabs, back buttons, and hyperlinks or give me death! Anything but the power-stripping captive-audience of native apps!
It would be much better to package your app as a small daemon that hosts a localhost webserver. The daemon can talk to all the system APIs it needs to. Add a desktop icon or shortcut that opens the localhost webpage. The daemon can present just a regular HTML hypertext webapps as usual, so all the usual bits of user-agency can slot into the overall experience.
Theres a lot of usenet-related apps that work like this, that run as daemons, and have web interfaces. Sunshine game streaming too.
It's be great to have some massively multi-platform http-headed app frameworks! That does seem semi missing, especially wrt mobile integration.
Because you're thinking of it backwards. Users have known for decades that they can click an icon, a window will appear, and that's the "application" they're interacting with. This is culturally ingrained as the basis of graphical operating systems (even mobile!) and it's a standard people want to continue meeting regardless of the underlying technology they use.
It just turns out due to historical reasons, in 2024, "the web" has the most easy-to-get-running cross platform UX system available, where you can produce an icon that people click, and it opens the app. That's basically the long and short of it.
At the end of the day most of the stuff you mentioned doesn't matter because these are, from the beginning, designed as applications that use the web as a way to deliver UI more than anything. Things you mention like back buttons (requiring you to design around stateless hypertext APIs rather than what would be local RPC, and which may be better handled inside the system anyway with e.g. its own undo system) or "browser history" either have large design consequences, or just don't make any sense at all.
To be clear, it's very useful in some cases to have the design you describe (true client/server architecture), and underneath it all Tauri does something like that. But it alone can't fulfill all the use cases something like Tauri or Electron aim to.
> The daemon can talk to all the system APIs it needs to.
That's not the problem, it's the impact on the downstream design, like the fact such a daemon can't cleanly interact with the native windowing context of the (existing) browser or operating system without duplication. You cannot add a proper system menu bar or global shortcuts to the design you described in any way that won't either be sucky and fiddly, or just outright reimplementing what Tauri already does anyway. Or consider alt tabbing and wanting to dial in on a specific app window. There are tons of small things like this that do not work.
You are absolutely the exception there, especially if you are talking about an average low tech user.
I don't have any understanding why that would be though. Even if it is true, is there a reason or is it happenstance / path-dependence?
It seems so inferior to have the same thing but lose access to the browser's suite of tools/capabilities. What could possibly change other people's opinion or what should I use to reconsider my perspective?
When it comes to a non-hosted web app most non-technical users would have no concept or ability to run a local web server whereas “install this app” is something they’re familiar with.
I’m talking from a position of “I have an app that I want to distribute to a population of end users.” If that population happens to be technical your solution would likely work fine. As well if you’re not distributing apps to end users you can do what’s right for you. But if you are you have to meet your users where they’re at.
As well operating outside of the browser has the advantage of OS integration (tray access, alt tab support, etc).
> When it comes to a non-hosted web app most non-technical users would have no concept or ability to run a local web server whereas “install this app” is something they’re familiar with.
Clearly not true.
Sonarr and Radarr for example installs like a normal app. Then sits in the system tray. If click the system tray, most options inside launch a web browser that brings you to the localhost webapp. https://sonarr.tv/
People seem to assume this would be a hard to handle thing, but you can easily applicationize your local web services. And your local web service daemon can expose things like a system tray, to afford some classic manageability.
> It seems so inferior to have the same thing but lose access to the browser's suite of tools/capabilities.
Explicitly removing the browser capabilities/tools is a feature imo. i.e to hide the moving parts.
Within a browser, the average low tech users may:
- ...install extensions(ad blockers? dark reader?) that interfere with the app in some way.
- ...mess with the back/forward buttons ,corrupting the router/ui state, or just get very curious why the back button kicks them back to the last page instead of closing a fullscreen modal.
- ...bookmark SPA js-driven pages where the ui state is not fully saved in the address bar(via query params, hashes, etc) and surprisingly find them broken/not working as intended when accessing the bookmark again.
- ...try to copy and send the "localhost" link to their friends and complain.(Hold on to your papers - I've seen this behavior at my workplace!)
All of those will generate complains, useless bug reports and sometimes negative reviews. While some (if not most) of the problems can be solved with great software design and extra care, I think solving these problems comes at a cost that can be very well avoided by simply removing these capabilities.
All but the last list user addordances that are good for the user and that a well designed webapp should accommodate for. The browser has some solid tools to for all of these. I don't see these as a burden, I see them as positive abilities of the web.
Write once run everywhere is the holy grail of app development and the browser is the only realistic way of achieving this.
I am curious, I work for a company that has a bunch of hardware(serial communication) that communicates to our modules is built via python. So all the backend tooling is python that has the drivers and quality of life functions to support that hardware. Would love to make a native experience instead of a webapp (flask etc)
Does anyone have a solution to this? Would love to use Tauri as a desktop server and create the WebView. But do I just use ffi for every single class/module/function?
Or does anyone know a more elegant solution to bridge the gap of making a native desktop experience while still leveraging the years of python drivers that have been built up
Oh they finally support mobile as well (at least beta.) Might be worth checking out again.
I use Tauri for my sync app that syncs music between my mobile app and desktop library. It's been a pleasure to use. Tauri 2.0 looks like it's going to be a real contender for mobile too.
One big difference between tauri and electron is that tauri can deliver to mobile, from my understanding.
Is there an hybrid way to deliver with tauri on macos and windows, but electron in linux?
It would be cool if there was a system where linux users could install one version of Chromium that is kept up to date on their distro, and Tauri would check if that is available first and somehow use that as the webview, otherwise falling back to whatever the system ships.
So you could have multiple Tauri apps that all use the same Chromium under-the-hood (this also has benefits that security is maintained better, as it is no longer the responsibility of individual app developers to keep a bundled Chromium up-to-date).
And then if they wanted to, app developers could disable the fallback entirely, so if you don't have that Chromium package installed you just get an error message saying "please install this package". As this is linux we're talking about, I doubt that would be a very onerous demand for these users.
I wonder if electron could be used for that purpose. It's effectively chromium in a digestible webview format. Having an always up to date electron would be useful for various reasons
Any reason why? Tauri works fine on Linux as I understand.
Built a video player using Tauri and the performance was terrible/unusable in linux under webkitgtk. Every release I'm hoping to see any solution, every release I'm dissapointed.
Multiple posts about WebKitGTK webview used on Linux being a source of problems.
Webkitgtk is a source of problems. If tauri could address that, it would become my go-to for app building.
Is there any hope that Tauri could use something else as browser on linux? Something based off firefox or chromium would be ideal... That would solve all the problems I have with it
Well… kinda. There is this new project called `verso` that from my understanding is coming from the Tauri team (but weirdly is in another org in GitHub): https://github.com/versotile-org/verso
Seem _very_ early days so who knows if it will have legs.
That's a whole browser, it doesn't make me very hopeful for what I'd like to see...
Related: Dioxus
> Dioxus is a Rust library for building apps that run on desktop, web, mobile, and more.
(Dioxus uses Tauri)
can I convert a pwa to Tauri? how much effort is needed?
I converted my Sveltekit PWA to a desktop app by running `tauri init`. I was amazed that it just worked.