Well, Chrome doesn't really allow chrome.dll to be easily used. Electron has deep requirements on Chromium for V8, IPC, webview, customer protocol handlers, etc IIRC so it can't just easily switch browser engines. I'd say if you want this, the Chromium project would have to prioritize a stable Chrome ABI from their shared lib which I doubt they would do. And it still doesn't solve the extremely mem-bloated approach they take to serving the web stack. So for that, the Chromium project would have to prioritize better runtime feature gating for mem reduction and maybe revive first-class support for single-process mode, which I doubt they'd do. And even then, you're carrying node.
To sum up my rant, I'm afraid the fast moving web stack, coupled with the fact only a few companies can keep up, coupled with the fact that those companies are laser focused on their own browser use case and not embeddability combine to make this incredibly common desktop use case still suck. In the meantime, just hope these OS engines stay minimal and don't fall too far behind the standards you want.
This is what makes me want to see something like Electron developed over Firefox internals.
Packaging my own browser with my code so that I am now developing toward ONE client instead of any random thing that can speak http, and at the same time, being able to take the core of my app, tweak it a little, and plop it out on the web without a complete rewrite ... that is completely amazing. It's what I've wanted since forever.
Even better would be the ability to optionally include features in my build. Like if I don't NEED WebGL, the MIDI and Audio APIs, etc, etc ... it'd be pretty nice to be able to optionally exclude those from the bundled browser to minimize size.
However, I don't want to be welded to google. Mozilla's codebase seems ripe for such a development.
> This is what makes me want to see something like Electron developed over Firefox internals.
Tried, but abandoned presumably based on prioritization: https://github.com/mozilla/positron. I was hoping Servo would help here, but from the outside looking in, the pieces are being moved into FF proper and the Servo browser's priorities have been reshifted to being a part of the VR team. Sure they're still making a general use browser (and that's quite a feat), but the embeddability game may suffer (I believe conforming to the CEF iface that was there original goal has become stale).
Having a browser installed isn't the problem. The problem is having a specific version of a specific browser installed because that's the only thing you've tested against.
(I'm not condoning this, and haven't worked with Electron myself, but that's my understanding of the motivation.)
But what happens if your js stack requires a feature that is only in chrome 65+ and someone elses stack relies on a feature that was depricated/removed in Chrome 60? Furthermore, does that mean if a user goes to task manager and ends the task of chrome, that your app would be killed too?
Which browser? Why do I want to spend my time making my desktop app run in Chrome and Firefox and Internet Explorer and Edge... and all the old versions of these. Plus the fun of saying to my customer "oh you have to upgrade your OS before you can run our app, sorry".
