Tauri

Tauri is a free construction-kit program for software developers. It lets you build applications that you install and launch on a computer just like any other – a note-taking app or a music player, for instance. The special thing about it: the visible interface with buttons, menus and text is built using the same techniques used to build a website. Yet the program still runs locally on the machine and doesn’t need a browser tab. Tauri is open source, meaning the entire program code is publicly viewable and may be used freely. The first stable version was released in 2022, and the second generation arrived in 2024, since when it has also supported phones.

Why small programs are a topic again

Many well-known desktop programs are, in reality, hidden websites today. To achieve this, they bundle a complete browser of their own, usually via an older tool called Electron. That’s convenient for developers, but expensive for the user. A simple chat program can easily take up 200 megabytes of hard drive space and several hundred megabytes of working memory this way.

Tauri takes the opposite approach and doesn’t ship its own browser. Instead, it uses the display technology that’s already built into Windows, macOS and Linux. As a result, finished programs often shrink to under ten megabytes. Memory usage also drops significantly, since a second browser doesn’t have to run alongside every single program.

The second reason is security. Tauri assumes that the interface may not do anything the developer hasn’t explicitly allowed. Access to files, the camera or the network has to be enabled individually. This makes programming more laborious, but it limits the damage if built-in third-party components behave unexpectedly.

Rust in the engine room, web technology in the shop window

A Tauri program consists of two halves. At the front sits the interface, written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript – the same three languages used to build websites. At the back sits the core, written in the programming language Rust. Rust is considered fast and memory-efficient and prevents many typical programming errors already at compile time.

The two halves communicate with each other via a clearly defined interface. The interface itself cannot open a file. Instead, it sends a request to the Rust core, and the core decides whether to carry it out. You can picture this like a counter in a library: the visitor isn’t allowed into the stacks, they name a title and are handed the book.

When compiling, Tauri packages everything into a finished installer file for the respective operating system. One special feature here is the built-in update function: programs can update themselves, checking via a digital signature whether the update really comes from the manufacturer.

Where Tauri applications show up

You’ll rarely notice Tauri, since a user can’t tell from a program what it was built with. In practice, it’s found mainly in developer tools, note-taking and knowledge-management programs, and increasingly in chat interfaces for language models. Such AI programs in particular are really just a shell around an online service – which makes a 200-megabyte package hardly worthwhile.

In tech news, Tauri almost always comes up in comparison with Electron. Electron is older, more widespread and has more ready-made building blocks; Tauri is leaner and more modern. A common misconception is that Tauri is automatically always better. Because each operating system uses its own display technology, the same program can look or behave slightly differently on Windows and macOS – something that doesn’t happen with Electron.

For you as a user, the practical consequence is simple: smaller downloads, less memory used, and often a faster startup. For companies, it’s a matter of cost, since a team only has to build the same interface once for multiple operating systems.