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Comment by reificator | Hacker News Reader

> the author stripped down Chromium for the UI in order to get something much lighter than an Electron app.

If an organization did this, I'd be all for it. An individual? I'd bet this is going to slow down updates to Chromium significantly, and eventually lead to either security issues or maintenance fatigue resulting in closure of the project.

I'm not saying it's 100% going to happen like that, but that's on the wrong side of my risk tolerance line for adding a tool to my everyday suite.

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It’s essentially an API testing tool. It is mostly used to poke endpoints on a development server and sometimes to learn the output patterns of a public API, what security concerns are there in stripping the UI?

It's less about the actual changes made and more that one person is maintaining a branch that diverges (significantly?) from upstream, on a project that is fast-paced and constantly under attack. If I'm using this tool to run tests on the network, and I'm several patches of Chromium behind, that makes me vulnerable.

That tradeoff can be worth it, but all I'm getting out of it here is reduced application footprint? I'd rather use the bloated tools or wait for someone with deeper pockets to make a less bloated tool. Or a similarly small project that writes it natively.

I haven't exactly dug into the codebase, but "stripped down Chromium for the UI" could very well mean CEF, which is widely-used by a lot of things (commercial and otherwise) and directly supported by Google. However, whether that's more lightweight than Electron is debatable.

If that concerns you, though (or if the author really did outright fork Chromium), it looks like it runs in an ordinary browser, too (e.g. via postwoman.io or localhost:3000).

I'm just going off the following quote:

> the author stripped down Chromium for the UI

If it's just CEF then I feel like that wording is misleading.

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