white screen on macOS 10.15

[mattyg]

The app launches, but the window just has a white screen on mac os 10.15

[mattyg]

I reproduced the issue on an emulated mac running macOS 10.15.5:

The issue is caused by the webkit version in the not supporting some required javascript features.

Overview

• macOS 10.15.5 ships with Safari 13.1
• Safari 13.1 lacks some javascript features required by our sveltekit frontend: at least bigint, logical or assignment
• We could try to support Safari 13.1 but this will require changes to our sveltekit frontend, built setup and possibly migrating from sveltekit to svelte. I.e. it will be a lot of effort:
  • Sveltekit doesn't currently support using @vitejs/legacy for injecting polyfills when building (see Differential legacy builds sveltejs/kit#12 & @vitejs/plugin-legacy compatibility sveltejs/kit#9515)
  • bigint cannot be polyfilled (see zloirock/core-js@9a523a1)

Recommended resolution

• macOS 10.15.7 can be updated to safari 15.x, but this does not update the webview used by tauri -- which is still the webkit version from safari 13.1 (see https://tauri.app/v1/references/webview-versions/ )
• macOS 11 includes a webview with the same webkit version used in safari 14.x
• Safari 14.x includes all our required JS features
• We should require users to be on macOS 11 or later
• We should set the minimum system version to macOS 11, so it displays a dialog and fails to launch if they are running on an older os

[mattyg]

Unfortunately, while macOS 10.15 supports up to Safari 15.x, the webview used by tauri is still the same as Safari 13.x, and thus does not have our required features. I think we'll want to require users on macOS 11+, but will confirm.

[mattyg]

Confirmed the app ui renders properly on mac OS 11