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.

▲ gigel82 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

▲ canucker2016 29 minutes ago | parent [-]

Microsoft Schedule+ was Microsoft's workgroup calendaring app before the Office division merged email and calendar into one app.

Outlook was late so Schedule+ was included in Office 95 for the Win95 release and so Schedule+ got a wider retail consumer release than if it had been just included with the Microsoft Exchange Server 4.0 release.

from https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/v73bk7/microsoft_...

  I've been using Schedule+ 95 to keep track of my daily activities since forever. I even modified my Windows install to keep it fully compatible after WinHlp32 was nixed in Windows 10. However, it is increasingly showing its age, and there are certain aspects where I would prefer a more modern solution; I can't integrate Sched+ with my smart phone easily ...

  I'm explicitly NOT looking for any cloud or web apps. I don't have reliable internet nor are all of my daily use machines fast enough to reliably, and responsively, display 90% of the bloated webapps out there. I want something lean, fast, and native for the desktop. Schedule+ uses a max of about 7MB of RAM and I don't want to go over 10-20.

7MB RAM is a lot when Win95 was designed for a 80386 with 4MB RAM. But a modern day x86 (okay, x64) with 8GB, that's about 0.1% of total RAM.