Wails v2 Beta for Windows

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2021-09-27 14:00:06

When I first announced Wails on Reddit, just over 2 years ago from a train in Sydney, I did not expect it to get much attention. A few days later, a prolific tech vlogger released a tutorial video, gave it a positive review and from that point on, interest in the project has skyrocketed.

It was clear that people were excited about adding web frontends to their Go projects, and almost immediately pushed the project beyond the proof of concept that I had created. At the time, Wails used the webview project to handle the frontend, and the only option for Windows was the IE11 renderer. Many bug reports were rooted in this limitation: poor JavaScript/CSS support and no dev tools to debug it. This was a frustrating development experience but there wasn't much that could have been done to rectify it.

For a long time, I'd firmly believed that Microsoft would eventually have to sort out their browser situation. The world was moving on, frontend development was booming and IE wasn't cutting it. When Microsoft announced the move to using Chromium as the basis for their new browser direction, I knew it was only a matter of time until Wails could use it, and move the Windows developer experience to the next level.