> Tauri doesn't and instead relies on webview, which uses a different browser engine dependent on your platform, with all the incompatibilities that come with it.
Isn't windows system webview now a chromium fork? This should make incompatibility on the major platforms now much less of an issue.
Some people haven't dealt with browser incompatibilities in the past. Not every developer comes from a webapp background, and electron is a platform to develop desktop apps. desktop app developers don't want to deal with polyfills and feature-detection in their platform.
It's weird to want all the benefits of web development without it's unfortunate quirks in my opinion. If desktop developers don't want to deal with them, which I think is reasonable, they have loads of other tools they can use to build desktop apps (and give the users a better experience most likely).
It's not weird - every developer wants to 'just code' their features/business logic without having to deal with the pain points of the tech. They choose web tech for their app because the opportunity cost of learning a desktop-native language is the time that could be spent bootstrapping an electron app and getting the product out the door earlier.
It seems like it would be pretty easy to get rolling a feature request for automatic polyfills. I'm not sure if Tauri pre-compiles the js it's handed, but if it does it can very easily check for what needs to be polyfilled.
how (if) important is using as minimal resources on the user's system? (if) Everyone agrees electron is bloated, is it (still) fair to prioritize developer "comfort zone" over actual specs?
Every developer needs to have a certain understanding of the environment he tries to build something. Just like printing 3d models - you need to know the characteristics of the material and limitations of them and the machine you're using. Blaming one of these later on just because you didn't want to read the manual is unprofessional.
What browser incompatibilities do exist are case-by-case basis, not all at once, depending on business domain and solution design, and even if, like you point out, you can just carpet bomb the issue with a poly/ponyfill.
The infantilization in frontend is accelerated by its veneer of supporting Product's sole mission in life to ship products ASAP, and I fucking hate it, and I've been some frontend engineer somehwere unimportant for 5 years now.
I wager, generalizing from my quite limitde experience, that a concerning amount of frontend devs just know how to schlep bags of data around and eventually get a desirable outcome with a framework keeping things narrowly from getting out of control when they are obvious re-factors, massive simplifications, that would get just as much expressiveness with less code. You will have bossess who only understand technical discussion in the form of "what framework or library should we use for this new epic?", like, bro, let's model the problem and see what we need from there maybe before we start thinking about writing code? You can almost just ask a frontend dev, "How would you refactor this or that code? to find out if they're just a baggage handler trying to minimize any concerted thought on their part. It's like frontend is corporate's proving ground on how to flatten all thinking and passion out of software engineering
Sorry, end of rant. I came to frontend from academia naively thinking people wanted to think about problems and put effort into solutions
That works for many scripting capabilities, but there’s plenty you can’t polyfill. If you’re stuck with the old MSHTML-based web view (which you will be on all but very recent Windows 10 and even sometimes there), there are various CSS Grid features that you can’t polyfill, and you’ll have a number of weird and annoying SVG sizing and styling issues quite apart from any potential missing features, and a bunch of other things like that—even if you polyfill everything in reach (which, even where possible, may perform terribly).
Isn't windows system webview now a chromium fork? This should make incompatibility on the major platforms now much less of an issue.