I have created a Java app (deployed by Java Web Start) which needs to use a browser to display HTML5 content. Due to such browser not necessarily being on the user machine, I’m bundling a portable version of Chromium in my JAR. This has two problems:
- The Jar is going to be almost 70 MB, Chromium taking up 64 MB.
- There doesn’t seem to be an easy way of creating a communication channel between my app running in the background and the browser window, short of bundling a web server as well, like Jetty or Jibble.
The size of Jar isn’t such a huge issue, unless it is way over 100 MB. However, the portable Chromium app seems to be windows only and I need to deploy on Mac OS desktops too. At the moment I’m launching Chromium in app mode (with --app="http://..."), because I just need a browser window with no interface.
So my question is, is there another browser I could bundle instead of portable chromium? Something that would preferably be lighter but it definitely has to support HTML5, and that I could control programatically from the Java background app (although a bundled webserver is a viable option, not sure how that would play with various firewalls). Maybe there is something lightweight and cross-platform based on WebKit?
JavaFX2 (this comes with Java 7) comes with a light weight html5 browser.