Awesomium 1.6 was designed from the ground up with the following goals in mind:
* Must render to a 32-bit BGRA pixel-buffer (most common image format)
* Must be absolutely windowless (to allow use in any context, 3D or otherwise)
* Must emulate Chrome's sandbox architecture (for security and crash isolation)
* Must support platform-agnostic input
* Must support Flash plugins on all platforms
* Must be flexible and easy to configure
* Must maintain a simple, easy-to-use API
Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) is largely intended to be used by "embedding chromium browser windows" in your application. That's a key difference-- you're embedding a window inside of your application versus the more versatile pixel-buffer that our RenderBuffer class provides. This makes it nearly impossible to use inside a 3D graphics context or in other situations where embedding a native window handle is not feasible.
Additionally, CEF has a single-process architecture which means it does not scale as effectively nor isolate crashes in the manner that Awesomium or Chrome does (the Flash plugin can crash on a web-page in Awesomium-- as is liable to happen-- and your application will continue to run as normal).
I personally have been working on embedding WebKit, Mozilla Gecko, and similar technologies for nearly five years now so I've got a pretty good deal of experience on how to do it right. If you need any help, feel free to drop me at line at support@awesomium.com