Can i use the google chrome gui library code for own desktop applications?:

Question

I mean is it useable like WxWidgets to develop total non web releated client apps. A HTML widget is always nice but does it provide all the other common widgets a typical appication needs?

Is it hard to generate a build script for an chrome based application or are the make files full of chrome specific paths and targets.

EDIT: I know that it is based on Webkit which is in QT. But for a webbrowser you need much mnore then the WebKit Widget. So it contains a complete GUI Toolkit which is native. It means it uses Cocoa on MacOSX and GTK on Unix/Linux and Win32/WTL on Windows. But at some level they have to create a common API again. So it has to be like WxWidgets a crossplatform toolkit. The question is if this is useable for development of a different API.

Please answer only if you understand how Chrome is designed.

And no i don't want to look at QT as it is not pure Cocoa (it's only using NSView and Appearance Manager) and i don't want WxWidgets as this is bloated and you see the design of 1992 together with very late Cocoa patches.

Answer 1

Chrome is heavily based upon the Win32 API. That's why porting it is a tough job.

If you want only the HTML renderer, you would want webkit and V8.

EDIT:

It means it uses Cocoa on MacOSX and GTK on Unix/Linux and Win32/WTL on Windows

Well, what do you expect? each of those have it's own native implementation and a set of patches. GTK's being the latest one, Windows and Mac OSX are rather obvious since Webkit is Apple's so they had to make it work with OSX, and Windows port of Safari.

Each of those is native port coded specifically for the targeted platform, it is not a wrapper/library like Qt or wxWidgets.

Answer 2

Not a direct answer to your question, but you might want to try Qt instead. It contains a browser widget based on WebKit (which is what Chrome uses as well) and it's nicely integrated with the rest of the library. Since it's primarily a GUI library, not a browser, it's easy to build applications based on it. I'm not sure if you can easily take out the Chrome GUI library.

Answer 3

This is not google this is Apple's WEBKIT it's free to use

Answer 4

I think the original question was more along the lines of "Does Chrome have something like XULRunner?" to code off of as a platform. I would like to know if there is such a thing as well D: