Apps using CEF include part of Chromium in their installer. The rest is left up to the developer, so the application interface can be a hybrid of web and other views, and the main process code is written in a language such as C++, C#, or Swift. It uses part of the Chromium browser to display that web content. It introduced the concept of building Chromium into native applications, bringing with it the benefits of the web platform and its tooling. Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF)ĬEF (2009) is a component for embedding web content within a native desktop application. Some of its internal parts are independently reusable, and are a key part of almost every desktop-web tool.

You may already be familiar with many - so read what you need, and skip the rest.Ĭhromium (2008) is the non-commercial open source web browser that underpins Google Chrome, and since 2020, Microsoft Edge too. It’s useful to know what the existing big things are, what they’re made of, and how they relate to or differ from the others. Primer: what’s here alreadyĪlmost everything in the desktop-web ecosystem is related in one way or another. Image edited by DALL♾ 2, using the prompt “people looking at a framed painting”.

In this post, I’ll take a look at what’s new in this space, what distinguishes them, and why WebView2 doesn’t solve everything. Promises of smaller and faster applications certainly appeal to those using Electron. Newcomer desktop-web framework Tauri has quickly attracted the interest of developers looking to build cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies.

Webview2