Can the sleeping fox ever wake up?

Mozilla seems to be asleep at the wheel, when it once drove online activity and communications. We have some suggestions where it could go.

  • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
    21·
    1 year ago

    Personally I think they should revive Positron, their electron competitor, with the launch of Servo. If it has the same benefits of Firefox vs Chrome, I think people would love apps that are on the slimmer side

    • sugar_in_your_tea
      15·
      1 year ago

      I don’t see the point, especially when there’s Tauri, which is a slim wrapper around whatever the default web view is on the target platform. That’s about as slim as you can get.

      Mozilla making it would merely be a Firefox-based Electron competitor, which would probably end up being similar in terms of size. I think that should happen, but the goal shouldn’t be to make apps slimmer, but to make a real Electron competitor (i.e. something that packages the browser with the executable).

      • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
        9·
        1 year ago

        I’ve never heard of Tauri before. It’s almost exactly what I would hope for from mozilla, and perfect for some of the apps I want to make. Ty!

        • sugar_in_your_tea
          7·
          1 year ago

          You’re welcome! I’m actually in the process of pitching it to my company to replace our Electron app, which has caused a bunch of problems for us.

            • sugar_in_your_tea
              2·
              1 year ago

              I’ll just describe how they work, and you can decide the pros and cons for yourself.

              Electron:

              • bundles browser with the app, so the dev can control exactly the version of the browser they’re shipping
              • language is JavaScript
              • quite stable from a development perspective

              Tauri:

              • uses system browser (Edge on Windows, Safari on macOS), so the browser gets updated with the system, not the app
              • language is Rust
              • younger project, but it’s also a relatively simple project

              I want to move our app to Tauri because:

              • we need to refactor anyway because recent versions of Electron break our app
              • install size is large, and we could refactor the web app to be offline-ready instead of relying on Electron features
              • Tauri gets security updates for the browser “for free,” so we could have our app “auto update” by just being a PWA
              • if we add desktop-specific features (e.g. move some of our computation to the FE), it won’t be in JS, so Rust offers better options (i.e. threading)

              So since we don’t need the features Electron offers, I want to use Tauri to reduce our maintenance overhead.