Browser engines these days aren't so bad, especially if all you need from them is basic CSS for the UI. You still have a fully-fledged native language underneath it, so you're not limited to what Web APIs can do.
CSS evolves and there’s always some new funky selector or effect coming, but the whole point is that you don’t need to follow this year’s latest hotness. If you slap rounded corners and box-shadow (very old by now) you have 90% of what Apple calls design lately. For Windows “metro” you don’t even need rounded corners :)
> but the whole point is that you don’t need to follow this year’s latest hotness
You might not have a choice. Sometimes even seemingly trivial APIs/features like SVG, flexbox, or audio/video behave slightly differently in different browsers, and it's easy to sink a lot of time into debugging these differences. I'm not saying the effort isn't ever worth it, and it's certainly better now than it ever was in the past, but I think you're underestimating the amount of work it takes to properly support a complex web app across all modern browsers.
With that said, if you're just using web technologies to throw together a UI to slap on your native app that does all the heavy lifting, then sure, maybe using something like Tauri is worth it. Even then, it might not be worth the QA burden of having to test all UI changes against every supported platform, and then the support burden of getting platform-specific bug reports.
> Fyi you need to optimize for two browsers only: chromium (edge) is the webview on windows, and webkit is the webview on linux and macos.
You're right, I keep forgetting that Microsoft has switched to Blink. It's still a pain if you're a Windows dev who needs to test on WebKit. Or is there an easy way to test that these days?
> I’m curious about the svg and flexbox issues you mentioned. I have not experienced any differences with those across systems and browsers.
To be fair, the differences I was thinking of were mostly between Gecko and Blink, so they're not really relevant to Blink vs WebKit. It's been many years since I've worked directly with SVGs, but I remember there being major differences between how different browser engines interpreted masks and some other features of SVG. I also think they scaled SVGs differently. The flexbox issue I'm thinking of had to do with how Gecko and Blink handled `height: 100%` inside a flexbox container that does not have a set height. I don't remember the exact difference, but I think Chrome assigned a height of 0 to the element, whereas Firefox greedily took up all of the available space, or something like that. Like I said, it's been a few years, so take all of that with a grain of salt. I just remember spending far too much time debugging those sorts of issues. :)
I’ve been writing web apps professionally for lovely browsers like IE6, Android 3.0, and Blackberry. I know when CSS can be hard to get working. 2022 WebViews are a walk in the park.
Yes yes, I don't mean to complain. :) Web dev these days is definitely a breeze compared to the "old days". I just don't like when people assume that cross-browser testing is no longer necessary at all, because there are still differences, especially if you use any of the newer or more obscure APIs.
Browser engines these days aren't so bad, especially if all you need from them is basic CSS for the UI. You still have a fully-fledged native language underneath it, so you're not limited to what Web APIs can do.