Browser Window

Browser Window is a simple Rust crate for utilizing a browser engine to create a graphical user interface. Just like Electron.js, you can build your GUI with HTML, CSS & JS, or simply have some browser functionality at your disposal.

Browser Window was born from the lack of a good and simple Electron alternative for Rust. There are other crates out there doing a similar thing, but they lack a few important key features.

Other alternatives tend to depend on the target platform's native browser engine(s), initially intended to have something that works out-of-the-box. However, nowadays that is really only true for macOS. Moreover, claims of small memory footprints are being made, with no actual evidence to back that up. This is quite deceiving really, as when you are using your platform's browser engine, this may only mean that the engine's memory resides in another process.

And then you still run into issues of portability because different browser engines support different HTML/JS/CSS features. So using one browser engine for all platforms should actually be desired if portability is of a concern. If you don't use platform dependent JavaScript (or Rust), and it works, it works everywhere. End of story.

Design Principles

Browser Window is designed to be simple to use, and to work cross-platform. It is built to utilize Rust's async/await syntax fully, so that exchanging data between the browser and your application can be straightforward, instead of using messy callbacks.

With other alternative crates, you can't just simply invoke a JavaScript function and return its output in one line like this:

let js_return_value = my_window.eval_js("my_js_func()").await.unwrap();

Something similar is available in Electron as well, and this is just something that is paramount to making two-way communication between the host-code (Rust) and client-code (JavaScript) comfortable.

Moreover, if you wish to use it in a multi-threaded environment, you can do that as well. There are thread-safe handles available for easy exchange of data & work between the GUI thread and others.

You can view some example to get some ideas of what is possible with Browser Window. There is an example of a basic terminal emulator, and an example of an authentication dialog that fetches the session cookie.

Requirements

Browser Window relies on the Chromium Embedding Framework, or CEF in short. Browser Window works on any platform that is also supported by CEF. Currently those are Linux, macOS and Windows, but macOS needs some testing.

However, that does mean it requires a bit of effort to set things up. Also, due to CEF's frequent release schedule, be sure to pick a version that is known to work, or try a new version at your own risk.

Getting Started

Click here for a manual on how to set up everything to be able to compile and run you app with Browser Window.

License

This software is available as open source software under a MIT license, for maximum freedom and minimum restrictions.

Development

If you want to help out, you're more than welcome!

Future Plans

At the moment, there is a decent set of functionality available, but if something is lacking, please submit an issue, and I'll take a look at it.

Otherwise, there are some things that are yet to come:

• Events [underway]
• Servo engine support (currently missing good embedding support)