Build browser based on Chromium Embedded Framework

[liamzebedee]

CEF is a framework developed by Google engineers which exports an interface to the Chromium browser engine in C++. It's the basis of Electron, the new Arc browser, as well as the foundation for all the other "webview-based apps" like Spotify and Steam and so on.

Dappnet's client is significantly complicated by the fact that we need to make websites HTTPS-compatible, in order for the apps to function due to a myriad of complex undocumented web application security policies enforced by the browser (such as apps using websockets requiring only HTTPS connections, and other things). For Dappnet v1, the extension used a custom root CA installed on the user's machine - obviously not ideal.

An alternative is to build a browser akin to the Tor Browser, a fork of firefox, where .onion websites inherit similar permissions to HTTPS websites. I built a prototype of this using Electron but it had no browser address bar. It's also written in javascript, which just feels like the wrong tool to build a browser in.

So I am wondering - could we create a crypto web browser, like Brave but using CEF? Where apps are distributed in web packages, where any web page is saveable to a "webpackage" format and natively "pinnable" to a personal instance. Where the wallet is built-in at a browser level, but much more performant than an extension, which suffers from cold boot every single time.

Originally this idea seemed a bit too far fetched, in terms of my intuition whether it would be a good long-term technological bet. But after seeing this tweet, there is actually a mountain of evidence that the web platform is ossifying (much like the world has converged on Unix paradigms) and Chrome is the Linux of the web application OS:

https://twitter.com/fkasummer/status/1826890244873953466