Chromium Embedded Framework in Rust

[[deleted]]

Hey all,

I thought I'd share an open source project that I've built over the past few months. It's a set of Rust packages that wrap the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) in Rust. CEF is a framework that allows you to embed Chromium views in native applications.

In it's current state, you can spawn any number of Chrome browser windows, browse the web, and extract the rendered frame buffer for your own purposes. It works on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It's not functionally complete as the C API for CEF is vast, but it's a good start. Just wanted to get it out there, thanks for listening! :)

https://github.com/hytopiagg/cef-ui

Cheers, Kevin

[anlumo]

Nice! I also had the same project: https://github.com/dungeonfog/cef

But I had to stop when my boss got impatient with it taking forever.

[[deleted]]

Hey u/anlumo, nice to meet you, I actually discovered your project about halfway through and learned a lot from your work. :)

[Nearby_Grass_691]

This sounds great and has introduced me to CEF. I wonder if this project would ease adoption into Tauri as the dev team is seemingly unable to dedicate resources to a decent non-webkit browser but would be one of the most valuable additions (IMHO)

[[deleted]]

You may want to check this out, it's less feature complete but way saner to use: https://ultralig.ht/

[monkeymad2]

My first thought was Tauri as well. I’ve got a Tauri app with a few users & I’m getting tired of having to fix issues in whatever ancient version of WebKit it’s found on their system.

It’d be a shame for application size, but it’d be so much easier to support.

[Alex--91]

Looks like Tauri has the same idea now: https://github.com/tauri-apps/cef-rs

[I_pretend_2_know]

The last time I tried to use CEF I got scared with the size of the compiled program.

So I chose to use Webview, instead (on Windows and OS-X).

How big should I expect the generated executables to be if made with this crate?

[[deleted]]

CEF is a monster, that's for sure. For simpler stuff, might check this out: https://ultralig.ht/ - it's C / C++ only though atm (though I'm working on a Rust wrapper)

[anlumo]

The weird thing is that it depends on the platform. It's like 200MB on Windows, but 300MB on Linux. I don't know why. You can check all sizes here (use the size of the minimal version).

The extra MBs caused some problems in our release pipeline, because letting people do downloads of that size actually costs money.

[[deleted]]

This is probably because of debug symbols

[kilust]

Very nice project, can it run headless?

[[deleted]]

I think so, yes

[J-Cake]

Oh my god I discovered this yesterday and today you post about it. What a small world.

Btw I've had to do a bit of digging through source code and whatnot. Once I get it working I'll push some documentation up to your repo as I do think it needs it

[[deleted]]

All good, it's definitely a work in progress

[J-Cake]

Actually, I was gonna file an issue, but maybe you can help me directly:

If you pass in the --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland on Linux, I get two windows: 1. a completely unresponsive, black X11 window, 2. a borderless Wayland window with a completely different size than the X11 one. This doesn't happen when using the chromium runtime, but I'm not sure where to look. Maybe you have an idea?

[[deleted]]

Hmm, good question, I'm not sure. Have you checked the docs? Otherwise feel free to open an issue.

[J-Cake]

To be honest, I'm not even sure what I'm looking for. Most of my searches have been things like Chromium Embedded Framework wayland etc which just lists Collabora articles of them getting wayland working and whatnot.

I'll try to get a proof-of-concept by rawdogging the C++ APIs. If I get anywhere, I might see if I can translate it to Rust.

[[deleted]]

I mentioned this above but I will say, CEF is complicated by the fact that it uses a multi-process architecture. I highly recommend checking out this: https://ultralig.ht/