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bob1029today at 3:51 PM1 replyview on HN

WebView2 can be a fantastic experience when the application is designed around it with intent. It can't be a technological afterthought. Taking an application that was designed for web and throwing it in a desktop shell is how you wind up with bad experiences. A hybrid of WebView2 and native elements seems to be the best approach. You can completely hide the browser startup delay with these techniques. The Discord engineers decided to just throw a splash screen in front and call it a day. You could do that too. It seems to fly.


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gigel82today at 3:57 PM

Until you look at memory consumption in Task Manager or Process Explorer. WebView2 spawns ~400Mb worth of various browser processes. Your main app process by itself might look nice and slim, but all that (somewhat hidden) cost is atrocious.

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