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Comment by andzt | Hacker News Reader

Awesomium is also an excellent product I've used before to embed the chromium engine in WinForms and WPF apps...

http://www.awesomium.com/

I can only recommend against Awesomium. Their library has a lot of bugs which I can see past, but the way they support their product is repulsive. On average it took them 3-5 days to get back to us on a email ticket with a half-baked response that then took another 3-5 days to clarify. The founder didn't seem phased that this was a problem and had zero empathy that we had deadlines to meet and software to ship.

We ended up ripping out Awesomium from our product and replaced it with CefSharp. Now we don't get held up by Awesomiums crappy support because we can just fix our problems ourselves. We couldn't be happier. That said, it would be nice if there was commercial support for CefSharp. We have a team of full time native developers who have to deal with CEF issues that would be nice to put on somebody else's plate. Anybody know if there is such a thing?

They make no promises about support even with their Pro edition [0]:

We currently do not offer premium, priority support plans for our commercial licensees. We will announce such plans if they become available in the future.

So Caveat emptor.

[0]: http://wiki.awesomium.com/licensing/licensing-overview.html

I'm bradgessler's cofounder. We were promised support in an email. That statement about lack of support for paid customers was added after we paid them and experienced the 3-5 day turnaround times. As I recall, the tickets were mostly us reporting defects.

Ah, ok...not so good.

Hey Brad, sorry Awesomium didn't meet your needs and that you eventually found something that worked. PollAnywhere looks pretty awesome now, grats!

Sad to see you felt I had zero empathy to your plight, a full refund was approved just weeks after your license purchase.

Awesomium is good but development is excruciatingly slow and the team seems to place no importance whatsoever on developer relations. Questions on their forum are very frequently ignored, and I've heard that the situation with email replies is similar. If you have an issue that maybe they haven't dealt with yet, they just ignore you, because perhaps it's easier to cover your ears and eyes then to address a problem that folks are having.

Awesomium team, if you're reading; guys! Get your customer relations sorted out! Answer every damn forum post! Make people love you! Many developers are using the free version of your product, but these are the same developers who will recommend that their employer buy your product. Your failures in these departments have stopped me from coming back or recommending your product to others. I can't speak for others, but I wouldn't be surprised if others feels the same way.

Disclaimer: I say all this with no knowledge of how overworked or understaffed you are, what technical problems you're currently facing, how much time you would need to spend answering questions or why the time between updates to your product is so huge.

I agree, we done f*cked up on the support side of Awesomium and most of the blame rests with me (we're understaffed, underfunded, and _extremely_ ambitious). Sorry!

For what it's worth, we have made huge progress on R&D these past 20 months and will be announcing the fully redesigned 2.0 soon. (And you can be damned sure we will be onboarding more customer support in preparation for the next product cycle)

Need any C# devs? Contact details are in my profile.

Fair enough. If I could say one thing; make it a company policy to have every team member spend an hour on your answers forum every morning answering all the unanswered questions. Make it a point of pride that you do this. An unhappy user of your product should be a lot more painful to you than the 15 minutes of your 12 hour day that you lose keeping that customer happy. Bad customer relations is poison that will hurt your company in the long run, and probably already has for many people.

Also, be frank and honest about issues that you are aware of but don't have time to fix right now. If you don't have an answer because there's no time for it right now, tell people. They will appreciate the honesty, even if it doesn't solve their problem right now.

Thanks for this, we'll work harder to have more upfront, prompt responses in the forum. Admittedly, the biggest issue has been a complete lack of enough developers to handle support during heavy development phases.

PS. for anyone reading, if you love UI and got a C++ or C# background, we're hiring! Email me at adam@awesomium.com

Except it being for the most part a corpse, it was at one time something nice I can see; but I see (and encourage) everyone I see who uses it to move to CEFSharp or Coherent UI if they need actual support and advanced features that were previously nested in awesomium.

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