Hey.
So, for quite a while,I have been facedesk'ing with CEF. Its so picky! It does not do all the nice stuff on OS X than it doe son Windows - furthermore, that applies to linux too it seems. But, getting past the limitations isnt all. Aside from using a lot of sub processes, CEF does not give what it could, like bare v8 access - ALTHOUGH the dynamic library does indeed export the neccessary v8::* symbols (posted about this at the feature request board).
So, I have been starting to look around for hours now. And I came to a fairly blunt solution. So, i went and tried to find alternative, embedable browser frameworks/engines/blahs. Here is my result.
Gecko
It was and appearently still is used. But when I open the "How to embed" page, I get a nice warning at the top sying that embedding Gecko is _deprecated_. Say what...
Dillo{/b}
FLTK based and...bad. No JS, no CSS3, it only really is a layout engine, period.
[b]WebKit itself?
Everything starts with...downloading 1GB of a SVN snapshot. and from what I read at the page, that obviously isnt even everything. It now uses JavaScriptCore, which is, from what I figured, not as good as v8. Okay, lets say it would not bother me. But... how to embed it? I see a lot of information about the library and stuff, but it does not give me a clean bit of information that tells me how to embed WebKit, and if i will ever have CSS3 and JS right within too - and, to build on Windows, it suggests the ultra-outdated Cygwin...? Oh-oh.
Blink
Would like to try that...if i would find a download link? Many information about development and so on and so forth...but yet, nothing about a download link. ...Google, you're kidding me.
Awesomium
Neat CEF hack, sadly closed source. I want to work with Open Source, and this doesnt offer it.
Summary.
I know, this might be a bad place to put that all up, but i just didnt even find any other place to talk about this. And the summary is rather simple. CEF is the ONLY real embedable browser. So that means, that I either find a way to work with CEF, or I just give up on the project I am working on. Because the more I try to use CEF, the ahrder it seems to become.
Node-webkit wants you to download the whole 14GB of google source code, just to build a tiny runtime. So this is a nono, because I am on a DSL 2000 with the weird occassion to have a 16.000ms of ping - no way of downloading this lot at once.
If anybody knows a usable, embedable browser engine thats maybe not as stubborn as CEF, i would be happy to learn about it! ^^
Kind regards, Ingwie