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Comment by The-Compiler | Hacker News Reader

I have considered using CEF as well (via cefpython), but the main deal breaker was that it isn't packaged anywhere - so I'd need to ship my own copy of it with qutebrowser, which is usually not something you can do with Linux distribution packages.

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> so I'd need to ship my own copy of it with qutebrowser, which is usually not something you can do with Linux distribution packages.

You definitely can. I do: https://cretz.github.io/doogie/. Prebuilt versions are available at http://opensource.spotify.com/cefbuilds/index.html. In fact, I'd say shipping with the browser is ideal for a few reasons. It's not a lib that should be shared across the system IMO.

Note the "Linux distribution packages", as in "your application being packaged by Linux distributions". That's pretty much not going to happen if you ship your own engine.

Could you elaborate why you'd prefer shipping it with the browser rather than sharing it?

Because I'm the only one using it, it occassionally has backwards incompatible API changes, most browsers ship with their own engines, it has a compilation step anyways for the wrapper, it is self-contained, etc. How do these packages ship Chrome or FF? They don't make them ship Blink or Gecko as shared system-wide libs IIRC. My browser is no different. (now, Qt on the other hand, is a different story, like Gtk or whatever)

Chromium and Firefox are kind of an exception there, as they are big enough for distributions to justify bundling the engine, and they are also the upstream projects where those engines are developed.

But you can't rely on any external entity's free service. Spotify are a great example of an org who'll deprecate it (if you are lucky) this week and then shut it down the next. Or maybe suddenly change it underneath you. If you are going to do this you must be able to build and host it yourself. And that's the hassle that was alluded to.

I don't rely on it, I leverage it because it's there. Of course I can build it and host it myself. But when compiling Chromium, prebuilt libs have value for quick iteration.

Fair enough. I guess it's not tricky to build for those platforms so you could get a replacment going quickly. An arm build would be useful though.

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