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Cobalt – a stripped down Chromium for apps, Linux and embedded systems

cobalt.dev

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Re: Cobalt – a stripped down Chromium for apps, Linux and embedded systems

#15

Post by unwiredben »

Cobalt is the primary engine that's used for running YouTube and YouTube TV on set-top boxes and smart TVs. If you notice that it looks the same on a Roku device or a Fire TV stick or a Samsung TV, that's because all of those are running a port of Cobalt and a special version of the YouTube website.

Re: Cobalt – a stripped down Chromium for apps, Linux and embedded systems

#16

Post by zackees »

password4321 wrote: post #11

So a browser supporting a subset of HTML maintained by Google employees with an MIT license supporting Linux (especially Raspberry Pi) and Android?

Yes. I worked on this project for three years. This is exactly what it is. It’s also much more stable than chrome.

Re: Cobalt – a stripped down Chromium for apps, Linux and embedded systems

#18

Post by phh »

piskerpan wrote: post #13

From the footer: > © Google 2019 Not exactly a new or fully supported project, but I do see recent commits on the repo.

It's definitely fully supported, it gets many upgrades and has a pretty long-term and serious roadmap.

I strongly recommend not to use it though.

Re: Cobalt – a stripped down Chromium for apps, Linux and embedded systems

#19

Post by phh »

PSA: I strongly recommend not to use Cobalt (unless of course you are a Google employee, with support from Cobalt team).

Cobalt's roadmap is 100% Youtube on TV roadmap. I've never seen anyone use Cobalt professionally for anything else. Even Android TV doesn't trust Cobalt for anything but Youtube.

It mentions "subset of HTML5" which begs the question of "which subset", and the answer is pretty much "whatever Youtube on TV" uses.

Please note that I'm not speaking of the actual quality of the project which in my experience is fine.

If you're wondering what to use then for an embedded Linux web browser: I don't have a professional experience on it, but most people I know use WPE WebKit/COG

Re: Cobalt – a stripped down Chromium for apps, Linux and embedded systems

#20

Post by mihashco »

c-smile wrote: post #7
mihashco wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know electron, but cobalt has some limitations. On page you can find what html5 and css3 tags are supported. List is limited. Cobalt also does not support WebGL. But binary has ~45mb and works really fast compared to other engines on embedded devices. I was not able to run react app on Cobalt, but preact works really well. I've also been doing experiments with the Vue framework and it also works.

> But binary has ~45mb ... Even this is too much I think. Sciter is 7 Mb on Windows and 11 Mb on RaspberryPi. Extra 3 Mb is Skia for rendering on Vulkan and/or OpenGL. And it supports full set of HTML5 elements. JavaScript is at full ES2020 level. The only reason I think why 45 Mb is there is because of video codecs. Sciter does not have them in core. But as loadable ffmpeg based plugin.

Thanks I will check Sciter! I almost forgot, Cobalt has a very well designed porting layer. Therefore, it is relatively easy to run it on custom Linux embedded devices. It also uses Skia as a backend for rasterization. As many people here have already written Cobalt is designed as a youtube player, but it can be successfully used for other purposes.
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