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by adamkhrona 5430 days ago
Hey, main developer of Awesomium here-- allow me to answer your question:

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

1 comments

very little conceptual difference. In practice however, Berkelium is really really immature. The API is much weaker, things like Flash may or may not work. The install is not as clean. I guess that's the difference between a small cost to a corporation vs free.

I realize that hobbyists would prefer free, but that's ok, since Berkelium is open enough that they can fix it.