Zebkit – Chromium as an embeddable library

For the size, I have some more to address: the real weight comes from Blink, V8, skia, network stack and media. WebRTC cannot be dropped since Blink depends on it. Video playback is need by most apps so it stays. And the webusb is small, drop it has little benefit.

The main differences are mostly from shape, not the engine: 1. Exposed as a library with bindings (rust, python, JS without node) that can be run in your application's own event loop 2. Almost everything in the engine have a hook point such as permission, network, dialog, menus .. 3. Exported Chromium's C Library (such as boringssl, zstd, ffmpeg ..) for your app so you do not need compile it or ship it twice such as ELectron. 4. Exported feature rich PDF library (pdfium with improved) 5. Playwright inside, no cdp and no node are required

Yep.

My sciter[.com] dll is about 18mb on Windows which is 10 times less than zebkit (171.2 Mb). And sciter's cold start (window creation, document loading and painting) is around 60ms that is 38 times less than 2.3 seconds of zebkit.

If this gets popular, expect Google to block it too.

Probably the two biggest user's of CEF (in terms of user base exposed to it daily) would be Steam and Spotify. Both relatively fast and efficient, compared to their peers, albeit the UX is another question.

And you pointed a real gap: the release archives contain no license or notice files, I will add them in next release. Thank you!

One clarification: Zebkit still uses Chromium's sandboxed renderer processes and shared memory internally. The embedding interface is a C API: your application links the library, keeps its own window and event loop, and can either embed a web view or receive off-screen frames to draw itself.

There's no Go binding yet, but the C API should be usable through cgo. If you give it a try, I'd love to hear where it fits your setup and where the integration gets awkward. Thanks for sharing your use case!

A browser is a good choice if it fits your app! Zebkit is for embedding Chromium into a native app while keeping control of the host.

https://github.com/zenbu-labs/terminal-browser

>Electron makes your app live inside its runtime. Its windows, its Node, its packaging. I wanted the opposite: Chromium as a library, the way you'd add SQLite.

First of all, thank you for doing this! This is a great idea! Since I see that your account is relatively new here on HN, one of the first thing that you should understand about the HN message forums is that at this point in time, it is probably about 50% bot comments, and there seem to always be the (agenda-driven!) comments that a given source code repository was "AI generated", or allude to / imply that idea...

Yes, there are some AI generated github repositories out there, but whether a given repo is AI generated or not, in whole or in part, is not necessarily a measure of the underlying utility of the software!

(In other words, watch out for those comments! Some may be true -- but they are usually agenda-driven and biased as hell -- always do your own research!)

OK, getting back to Zebkit -- I think it's a brilliant idea!

Chromium as a library like SQLite -- brilliant!

>zebkit is Blink, V8, PDFium and FFmpeg in one library you link into your own program, in C, Rust, Python or JavaScript. Your app keeps its own event loop, windows and toolkit. Where it needs the web it adds a view. It can be a window, a child of your own window (X11, NSView, HWND), or off-screen with the frames handed to you.

Really nice! And no Electron, even better!

>Against the latest Electron (45.2.1), on Linux: - 34% smaller (62 MB compressed) - cold start in 2.3 s instead of 6.6 - pages in 29% less memory - same DOM, text-layout and JavaScript speed

Again, terrific!

>No Node: your app is native code, or JavaScript run on the engine's own V8.

Excellent! (Node is bloated as hell and many libraries import every unnecessary dependency under the sun... I don't mean to trash it, Node is tremendously useful for a variety of tasks, but it is in need of better dependency management...)

>Everything the engine would show the user or ask of the system is your app's to decide: - permissions, popups, downloads and certificates - network requests, at every stage - the window frame, so the page can be your title bar - menus, dialogs, notifications and tray icons - USB, HID and serial device pickers - screen capture. Without your code, a page gets nothing a cautious browser wouldn't give it.

That's the way to do it!

>It also exports Chromium's own C libraries for your app (SQLite, BoringSSL, ICU, HarfBuzz, zstd and others), plus a full PDF API.

Nice!

>I'd love feedback, especially from people who've hit Electron's or CEF's limits.

From a Software Engineer with 20+ years experience (me!) -- It's f'ing brilliant!

I'm sure we'll see a lot of great future software written around Zebkit (Fast, responsive non-Electron-based editors are the most immediate ones I can think of , but I'm sure we'll see a whole lot more!)

One request if I might -- In the future, you might want to support other JavaScript engines... if so, then the interfaces between Zebkit (JavaScript interface) and V8 (JavaScript implementation) should be as decoupled as possible. That might be a problem because V8 might already be tightly integrated with the rest of the source code. But if Google coded the Chrome/Chromium source code correctly, (I don't know, haven't looked at that code recently), then the Chrome/Chromium JavaScript interface with V8 would be coded in such a way to allow easy replacement of V8 with a different JavaScript engine.

In other words, the choice of the JavaScript engine would ideally be modular and at the person compiling the code's discretion!

Anyway, your work is absolutely brilliant!

(BTW, shoot me an email if you'd like to have a longer discussion -- peter.d.sherman@gmail.com)