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I'd like to know more about why the .NET WebBrowser control was deemed unworkable. Is the problem with the actual WebBrowser control provided by the IE engine, or just the .NET interface to it (presumably the one provided by WPF)?

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The WPF browser control is pretty weak. You don't have great control over which rendering engine it will use (default is to go to IE 7 mode!) except via writing a registry key to switch it. It provides almost no bridge between the JS and native code as well. I haven't used CefSharp, but I have used Awesomium, which provided pretty good JS-C# bindings, so I assume CefSharp has at least working JS-C# bindings.

I've also had a great experience with awesomium which imo has a more powerful api than cefsharp, I'm curious why they chose it over awesomium.

I guess the reason is that they (Awesomium) don't provide an Open Source license like MIT or GPL. Instead Github Team choose CefSharp.

My key problem, working with it, is you're stuck with whatever IE the user has installed on their machine.

With CEF (which I've used, as have many other big companies - search your Windows PC for the dlls if you don't believe me), you're guaranteed every user has the same version of Chromium.

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