Rust-WebUI

Use any web browser or WebView as GUI, with Rust in the backend and modern web technologies in the frontend, all in a lightweight portable library.

Features

Parent library written in pure C
Lightweight ~200 Kb & Small memory footprint
Fast binary communication protocol between WebUI and the browser (Instead of JSON)
Multi-platform & Multi-Browser
Using private profile for safety

Examples

Examples are found in examples/ and can be run with cargo run --example <example_name>.

Installation

Add webui to your dependencies in Cargo.toml:

webui-rs = { git = "https://github.com/webui-dev/rust-webui/", branch = "main" }

# Or by git tag
webui-rs = { git = "https://github.com/webui-dev/rust-webui/", tag = "v2.4.2" }

# Or by git commit
webui-rs = { git = "https://github.com/webui-dev/rust-webui/", rev = "a1b2c3d4" }

Then bring in the static WebUI static release or build action file for your platform and place it in your project's root directory.
That's it!

Usage

use webui_rs::webui;

pub fn main() {
  let win = webui::Window::new();
  win.show("<html><body><h1>Hello, World!</h1></body></html>");
  webui::wait();
}

UI & The Web Technologies

Borislav Stanimirov discusses using HTML5 in the web browser as GUI at the C++ Conference 2019 (YouTube).

Web application UI design is not just about how a product looks but how it works. Using web technologies in your UI makes your product modern and professional, And a well-designed web application will help you make a solid first impression on potential customers. Great web application design also assists you in nurturing leads and increasing conversions. In addition, it makes navigating and using your web app easier for your users.

Why Use Web Browsers?

Today's web browsers have everything a modern UI needs. Web browsers are very sophisticated and optimized. Therefore, using it as a GUI will be an excellent choice. While old legacy GUI lib is complex and outdated, a WebView-based app is still an option. However, a WebView needs a huge SDK to build and many dependencies to run, and it can only provide some features like a real web browser. That is why WebUI uses real web browsers to give you full features of comprehensive web technologies while keeping your software lightweight and portable.

How Does it Work?

Think of WebUI like a WebView controller, but instead of embedding the WebView controller in your program, which makes the final program big in size, and non-portable as it needs the WebView runtimes. Instead, by using WebUI, you use a tiny static/dynamic library to run any installed web browser and use it as GUI, which makes your program small, fast, and portable. All it needs is a web browser.

Runtime Dependencies Comparison

	Tauri / WebView	Qt	WebUI
Runtime Dependencies on Windows	WebView2	QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets	*A Web Browser*
Runtime Dependencies on Linux	GTK3, WebKitGTK	QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets	*A Web Browser*
Runtime Dependencies on macOS	Cocoa, WebKit	QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets	*A Web Browser*

Supported Web Browsers

Browser	Windows	macOS	Linux
Mozilla Firefox	✔️	✔️	✔️
Google Chrome	✔️	✔️	✔️
Microsoft Edge	✔️	✔️	✔️
Chromium	✔️	✔️	✔️
Yandex	✔️	✔️	✔️
Brave	✔️	✔️	✔️
Vivaldi	✔️	✔️	✔️
Epic	✔️	✔️	not available
Apple Safari	not available	coming soon	not available
Opera	coming soon	coming soon	coming soon

License

Licensed under the MIT License.