Royal Apps

Hi,

may I ask what you expect for the Edge (Chromium) browser integration what you can't have with our current Chromium integration?

Regards,
Stefan

I'm not sure if the "impact" or "difference" between using Edge (Chromium) and the Chromium Engine we have right now is clear. When we support Edge Chromium (which still is far from being production ready), we actually do not (and cannot) use the installed Edge Browser. We need to ship the Edge Chromium Runtimes separately (a bunch of DLLs) and is basically not really identifiable as "Edge Chromium" or "Google Chromium", etc. The same is true with our current Chromium Engine. It's basically the same engine but we ship some (3rd party) DLLs which contains the Google Chromium engine and provides API access to it.

To be clear, having a company wide policy which restricts certain browser engines (Edge Chromium or Google Chromium) will have no effect on the integrated browser engines we ship because we don't use the actual installed browsers.

I hope this makes sense.

Regards,
Stefan

I think the answer to this question is very complex and I'm afraid I'm not really qualified to answer it. The browser vendors must provide API surfaces. Royal TS is a .net framework based application (managed/c#) and Google's interest to provide a "managed" API which allows you to embed a browser in such an application is basically not existent. That's why we are forced to use 3rd party libraries to get Chromium based pages into our app.

Microsoft had a very thin wrapper for Internet Explorer to embed in other applications (WebBrowser control) but as IE is outdated and the wrapper was really thin (almost no advanced features available), it's not really an option anymore.

I know that the new WebView2 (which is the name of Microsoft's Edge Chromium based embeddable browser) is not yet production ready and one big ask of the community is to provide a better way to deploy the engine to the client machine. Right now there are basically two options: we ship the MS Edge Chromium runtime with the app (this will put another 200 MB or more on top of our redist package) or the user installs the WebView2 runtime: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/concepts/distribution

In both cases, you can't really make use of your installed Edge Browser. Because the APIs we use in our app might not be compatible with the browser version installed on your machine. This can get really messy over time. Imagine you have 4 or 5 different applications which use all a different version of WebView2. You will end up with 4 or 5 different runtimes installed on your box at the same time. This is a really bad design decision from MS and they surely have their reasons for this approach but I'm not sure if this is a practical solution...