BrowserWindow

BrowserWindow is a simple Rust crate for utilizing a browser engine to create a graphical user interface. Just like Electron.js, you can build your GUI with HTML, CSS & JS, or simply have some basic browser functionality at your disposal. BrowserWindow was born from the lack of a good and simple Electron alternative for Rust.

Introduction

BrowserWindow is designed to be easy to use, and work cross-platform. It is built to work in Rust applications that utilize async/await syntax - or that don't do that at all. It even has optional thread-safe handles. There are currently two different underlying browser frameworks that can be selected: WebkitGTK or CEF.

CEF (or the Chromium Embedding Framework) is recommended when used on Windows, but requires more effort to set up. WebkitGTK is recommended when used on Unix-like systems or when cross-compiling, and is genereally pretty easy to set up. Enable feature cef or webkitgtk to select either one.

Moreover, if you wish to use it in a multi-threaded environment, you can do that as well. There are thread-safe handles available for easy exchange of data & work between the GUI thread and others.

You can look at some examples to get an idea how you can use the api.

Getting Started

The underlying framework, be it CEF or WebkitGTK, needs to be installed on your system. There is a guide to get you started with using BrowserWindow on your own system.

License

This software is available as open source software under a MIT license, for maximum freedom and minimum restrictions.

Future Plans

At the moment, there is a decent set of functionality available, but if something is lacking, please submit an issue, and I'll take a look at it. There are not a lot of functions exposed in the BrowserWindow object. If you need a feature that isn't there, let me know!

Otherwise, there are some things that are yet to come:

• Support for the Microsoft Edge WebView2 framework.
• Events
• Support for Webkit with Cocoa on MacOS.