Comment by derefr

The target you're thinking of with outdated OS webviews is probably Android. Tauri doesn't even support Android; it's a desktop framework.

On both Windows and macOS, the "OS webview" is just a framework binding to the OS-shipped browser (i.e. Edge, Safari); and both Edge and Safari get updated with pretty much every release of the OS (which, in turn, are kept up-to-date in a pretty pushy way these days by Microsoft and Apple.)

Also, in both of these cases, by relying on these OS webviews, you're "sharing" the renderer and other global context with the actual browser (if the user happens to use it), and with all other OS webviews on the machine — rather than each new app needing its own renderer and global context, wasting 1GB+ of memory per app and creating thousands of redundant files on disk for the app's own cache et al.

It's really a pure win vs. Electron for these cases.

On Linux, what you get depends on the distribution format. If distributed as a package, you get a dynamic binding to WebKitGtk — which requires the package manager to resolve and install this (and that might not work, if the distro doesn't ship that package.) If distributed as an .AppImage, you get a vendored-in copy of WebKitGtk — which is basically the same as what you get from Electron.