People have been trying the WebView approach for years. (Projects include: Quark, Electrino, DeskGap, Revery, and Neutralino.)
Historically, it worked terribly on Windows.
On Windows, if you used the OS WebView, your Windows 7 users would be forced to use IE11 to run your app, even if they had a newer/better browser installed locally. On Windows 10, you'd get whatever random version of Edge was installed, or the new Chromium-based Edge.
In 2021, we're in a new era for Windows WebViews, thanks to Microsoft shipping WebView2 at the end of 2020, which ensures that the OS-provided WebView will be a modern version of Chromium. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ Tauri supports WebView2 and I bet it will work a lot better than historical approaches.
Support is still pretty dicey on other platforms, though. macOS doesn't have anything like WebView2, so if you want to support a five-year-old version of macOS (which isn't that old in desktop terms), you'll be forced to support and test your app on a five-year-old version of Safari. (The user might have upgraded to a two-year-old version of Safari, but they might not, if they prefer Firefox or Chrome, and that's now your problem.)
The easiest and best way to improve the user's experience on old OS versions is to provide your own copy of Chromium, like Electron does.
At that point, if you've shipped an Electron app for macOS and Linux, maybe you just wanna ship an Electron app for Windows and call it a day?
Having said that, if you can keep your OS-version support matrix tight, Tauri might work OK for you.
Fortunately MacOS users upgrade very quickly. High Serria which is slowly waning at 7% came out in 2017. Compared to windows where twice as many (16%) at still using Windows 7 and won't be able to download the Webview2 update which Microsoft kindly provides.
We use the WebView approach for Kreya[1], though not with Tauri. We had some occassional issues with Chromium/Safari differences, but otherwise it works fine.
We use WebView2 on Windows, Safari on macOS and WebKit2GTK on Linux. Not shipping a whole Chromium installation on each install and update reduces the installer and on-disk size a lot!
> you may install Kreya by downloading the tarball. Note that both libgtk-3 and libwebkit2gtk-4.0 dependencies are required. Install them manually if they aren't present on your system.
libwebkit2gtk is, itself, _an embedded browser_, 44MB installed size, plus dependencies.
It's convenient that you can make Snapcraft install it for you, but that's not really different from making Snapcraft install Electron and running that.
The Apple Silicon (M1) issue is because .NET (which we use for our "backend") doesn't support it yet.
Linux does not have a core WebView out of the box, so libwebkit2gtk is the closest alternative. Not optimal, but it works. Looks like Tauri uses libwebkit2gtk too.
Historically, it worked terribly on Windows.
On Windows, if you used the OS WebView, your Windows 7 users would be forced to use IE11 to run your app, even if they had a newer/better browser installed locally. On Windows 10, you'd get whatever random version of Edge was installed, or the new Chromium-based Edge.
In 2021, we're in a new era for Windows WebViews, thanks to Microsoft shipping WebView2 at the end of 2020, which ensures that the OS-provided WebView will be a modern version of Chromium. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ Tauri supports WebView2 and I bet it will work a lot better than historical approaches.
Support is still pretty dicey on other platforms, though. macOS doesn't have anything like WebView2, so if you want to support a five-year-old version of macOS (which isn't that old in desktop terms), you'll be forced to support and test your app on a five-year-old version of Safari. (The user might have upgraded to a two-year-old version of Safari, but they might not, if they prefer Firefox or Chrome, and that's now your problem.)
The easiest and best way to improve the user's experience on old OS versions is to provide your own copy of Chromium, like Electron does.
At that point, if you've shipped an Electron app for macOS and Linux, maybe you just wanna ship an Electron app for Windows and call it a day?
Having said that, if you can keep your OS-version support matrix tight, Tauri might work OK for you.