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**Daniel Thompson:** But should it become something that the group is interested in in the future - well, we've laid the groundwork for it. If the POCs turnout, if the collaborations continue; if the funding is made available, if the funding is palatable, if the engineers come together. There's a lot of ifs and a lot o... |
**Break**: \[46:04\] |
**Jerod Santo:** I have one more if for you then... An if and a what. So if you could assemble all those pieces together, if you could have all those resources, then what would compel you to build a web browser, and what does it need? What would differentiate the kind of browser you can envision, comparatively to what'... |
**Daniel Thompson:** Well, first of all, first and foremost, it absolutely has to be privacy-respecting. It has to be securely-designed. And I know those are two simple words to just drop into a sentence... It's easy to drop those two words into a sentence, and say "Yeah, it has to be privacy-centric, and secure by des... |
I think ads should just disappear. I did an artwork over a decade ago where somebody made a Firefox plugin, where you could supply different banner sizes, and then -- I gave him a collection of images, and then they would replace all the ads in the browser with artwork. I loved that project; I never forgot about it. |
I think that the way in which we've been instrumentalized and forced to use the browser is kind of sad. I mean, I understand why; there's a lot of big money behind it, and big ad tech, and I think that the industry would be very much opposed to a browser without ads. And secure - by security, I meant that things like y... |
\[50:00\] I think that the easy way to look at security is to say "Oh, it's just about my passwords." The reality on the ground is that sometimes we share passwords. My mom, and her husband - they had to share a password for their banking, until I caught them. And I was like "No, guys. You can't do that. You can't shar... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, those were two aspects of the things that I put on my list, Adam, of what we want in a web browser... And I know the main thing that we all agreed we didn't want was an ad company living inside of our web browser, which is why we have gone elsewhere. Super-interesting, Daniel. I think if you ever... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** No, but I think the components he mentioned, which -- the signing, the delivery, the distribution... I agree with everything you said there, Daniel; you're essentially building the necessary bones to build the skeleton of a browser. And Jeremy just talked about that. Obviously, we're not going back ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, I mean, it would also need more than just that, of course... But we don't need to talk about -- |
**Daniel Thompson:** Oh, God. It would need perfect visual representation, it would need to have CSS 3 compliance... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** See? There he goes again. \[laughs\] |
**Daniel Thompson:** ...it would need to have TypeScript from the get-go... It has to have WASM... I mean, of course, there's a laundry list of things that make a browser a browser. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Performance. Speed. |
**Daniel Thompson:** If it doesn't have those things that we ascribe to browsers, it's not a browser. |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. And I'm not saying baseline browser features. I'm saying it would need -- I know you chose the differentiating factors. But also, I think speed, performance, battery use, these are things that are also very important, alongside privacy and security. So there's a lot of things that go into making ... |
**Daniel Thompson:** \[53:52\] I think, just to address it - I made some mistakes, engaging in this idea that Tauri is better than Electron, and here's why... And I even got into a Twitter battle with \[unintelligible 00:54:04.00\], where I proved that we were better in some way... And after reflecting on it, I think t... |
For example, you might consider it a bad thing, but it does bring a unified web interface to the major desktop platforms. It's the same interface. If you look at it in Windows, it's gonna look the same as it is on Linux. So I think that that's something that we don't currently have. |
You also get an amazing general runtime of Node.js, bundled with joy, that can do anything. Basically, if you can think it in JS, your isomorphic skills are going to come in totally handy. You're going to be able to follow documentation that's been built over -- I mean, Electron's like almost... Is it 10 years old now?... |
What Tauri has going for it are you only ship the parts of software that you need to run it. You don't need to ship a generalized runtime. So by doing that, we can reduce the actual engine size of a Tauri app down to 500-600 kilobytes, maybe 400, depending on how aggressive you compress. |
Tauri is also -- I might get some flak for saying this. Like, people do benchmarks, and they benchmark, and they compare, and like "Oh, this is a Hello World Electron app. This is a Hello World Tauri app. And this one starts up this fast, and this one starts up this fast. I know which is better." But ultimately, what's... |
I'm very much convinced that as Tauri technology gets adapted by more and more teams, it does become a financial factor once you start to consider massive traction. I mean, if your app is downloaded a million times a day, the difference between 200 megabytes and 10 megabytes is going to mean something to somebody in yo... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Daniel Thompson:** But until then, we have to conserve electricity, we have to protect the planet, and every little thing we can do is important. And like I was saying, as Tauri grows more and more relevant and more widely used beyond the Fig.io's and Spacedrives out there, it actually concretely positively impacts t... |
Now, you could argue that the most performant app, the most secure app is the one you don't build. But I think that's a red herring. I think that people are going to continue to build apps, and we just want to make sure that they're sussed out with the right tools. |
\[58:08\] What does Tauri also do better than Node.js? Well, we can integrate very easily with third languages. There's actually a dynamic library example that lets you rig Tauri from C++. Like I was saying before, people are building Elixir bindings, and Python wrappers, and PHP engine backends... And that ability for... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. That third language thing is really cool. I wasn't aware of that until you told me here earlier. I think that's really interesting. And I agree with you; I worked early on in some isomorphic contexts. I think with Meteor.js, where I was just as lost, and where was, in that the benefit of having a... |
Interesting you mentioned user interface to a certain extent, and an Electron advantage with regards to what they provide... What does Tauri provide when it comes to interfaces? As I was kicking the tires, I was expecting kind of more like widgets, and other things, where you can just like "Give me a file explorer, giv... |
**Daniel Thompson:** Technically, you're right. The various ways that people can interact with Tauri are gonna sound stupid - menus... Menus are part of the user human interface chair... |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. |
**Daniel Thompson:** Taskbar applications... You have a little dropdown or a dropup, that gives you a little insight, close the app, show me the open windows... |
**Jerod Santo:** Totally. |
**Daniel Thompson:** The window itself, the copy buffer, the keyboard, the mouse, the pointing device, potentially multi-touch, the microphone, the camera - those are the things that we wanted to make sure we got right. We talked about, at one point, even making a crate for people who want to play around with those lit... |
\[01:02:01.01\] Now, a window isn't just a window. There's transparent windows... I'm being pedantic, but it's important, I think. There's transparent windows, there's windows with decorations, there's windows with title bars... These are all like classical things that we touch. The size of the window, the position of ... |
**Jerod Santo:** The lovely telemetry, yes. |
**Daniel Thompson:** Then, on macOS, it's WK WebView, which is version-locked to the Safari that you have installed on your latest update... And on Linux, it's WebKit GTK, which itself isn't totally feature-compliant; for example, WebRTC doesn't work there. So we also built two other kinds of Windows. So there's an imm... |
And recently, it's not actually been made super-public yet, but there is also a web GPU window type that you can create. For example, the Bevy game group, they need the WGPU, but they also would like to put some HTML type buttons on it. It was a research project with CrabNebula; we put that together in about a week. So... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[01:05:51.18\] And did you say earlier -- I kind of expected that to be the product of CrabNebula. So I was thinking more along the Tailwind, CSS is the open source project, and then Tailwind UI is like the thing that you go and buy. And so I was kind of expecting -- you did mention productizing some ... |
**Daniel Thompson:** Can I be honest with you? I think that market is right now too small. |
**Jerod Santo:** Fair. |
**Daniel Thompson:** I think that market needs two to five years to mature. Maybe two. Maybe less if we're really successful doing what we're doing. But right now, it's not the time to bring that out. I think that there's so many options for people to build stuff that -- yeah, I mean... |
**Jerod Santo:** Fair enough. I always get a laugh at the phrase "Can I be honest with you?", because it's like "Well, what have you been doing this whole time, Daniel?" Come on... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[laughs\] |
**Daniel Thompson:** I'm -- um... |
**Jerod Santo:** I know. I'm just kidding. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Jerod...! |
**Daniel Thompson:** In German, they call them Floskeln. |
**Jerod Santo:** What does that mean? |
**Daniel Thompson:** ...which is like little flippers. It's like little things you inject into a sentence to pass the time while you decide if you're actually going to say the thing you want to say... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right?! Nah, I'm just giving you a hard time. Good stuff, Daniel. We've talked about a lot... Is there anything obvious or big regarding your news, and your release? 2.0 you mentioned. Is this stuff burgeoning? You have a product in the fall... What's coming out? What else haven't we talked about or th... |
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