Cobalt – a stripped down Chromium for apps, Linux and embedded systems
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Re: Cobalt – a stripped down Chromium for apps, Linux and embedded systems
#2I was hoping this article would tell me how it is different from Electron. Does anyone know? I'm guessing the main difference is that electron is "full chromium" while cobalt is using a modified smaller chromium.
Re: Cobalt – a stripped down Chromium for apps, Linux and embedded systems
#3I was hoping this article would tell me how it is different from Electron. Does anyone know? I'm guessing the main difference is that electron is "full chromium" while cobalt is using a modified smaller chromium.
It's not Electron, it appears to be pretty much a browser-like rendering engine from scratch but for a very limited subset of HTML. Only a handful of tags are supported:
https://cobalt.dev/development/reference/supported-features....
but the result is more appropriate for some kinds of embedded environments.
Re: Cobalt – a stripped down Chromium for apps, Linux and embedded systems
#4I was hoping this article would tell me how it is different from Electron. Does anyone know? I'm guessing the main difference is that electron is "full chromium" while cobalt is using a modified smaller chromium.
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.
Re: Cobalt – a stripped down Chromium for apps, Linux and embedded systems
#5I was hoping this article would tell me how it is different from Electron. Does anyone know? I'm guessing the main difference is that electron is "full chromium" while cobalt is using a modified smaller chromium.
> The Cobalt Authors originally maintained a port of Chromium called H5VCC, the HTML5 Video Container for Consoles, ported to each of the major game consoles, designed to run our HTML5-based video browse and play application [read YouTube]...
> After wrestling with [the constraints of] this for several years, we imagined an environment that was not designed for traditional scrolling web content, but was intended to be a runtime environment for rich client applications built with the same technologies -- HTML, CSS, JavaScript -- and designed from the ground-up to run on constrained, embedded, Living Room Consumer Electronics (CE) devices...
> The Cobalt Authors forked H5VCC, removed most of the Chromium code -- in particular WebCore and the Chrome Renderer and Compositor -- and built up from scratch an implementation of a simplified subset of HTML, the CSS Box Model for layout, and the Web APIs that were really needed to build a full-screen SPA browse and play application.
Re: Cobalt – a stripped down Chromium for apps, Linux and embedded systems
#6I was hoping this article would tell me how it is different from Electron. Does anyone know? I'm guessing the main difference is that electron is "full chromium" while cobalt is using a modified smaller chromium.
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.
does not support WebGL? thanks, gonna look into that.
Re: Cobalt – a stripped down Chromium for apps, Linux and embedded systems
#7I was hoping this article would tell me how it is different from Electron. Does anyone know? I'm guessing the main difference is that electron is "full chromium" while cobalt is using a modified smaller chromium.
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.
Re: Cobalt – a stripped down Chromium for apps, Linux and embedded systems
#8Earlier 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.
I would understand your argument if you were talking about more constrained systems, but RPIs have GOBS of storage and memory. A 45mb executable vs 7mb executable is totally negligible.
Re: Cobalt – a stripped down Chromium for apps, Linux and embedded systems
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I would understand your argument if you were talking about more constrained systems, but RPIs have GOBS of storage and memory. A 45mb executable vs 7mb executable is totally negligible.
It is not about binary size per se, but of features/binary ratio.
Can Cobalt run, say, ChartJS as it is (https://sciter.com/chartjs-in-sciter/)? Seems like not as I do not see in the list of its supported elements.
Re: Cobalt – a stripped down Chromium for apps, Linux and embedded systems
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