Hi Aleks, hi all,
We absolutely agree with you, Aleks: The current “Chromium” integration is for the most part useless:
- it’s not up-to-date, but it’s 3+ years old
- it’s not maintained properly – and therefore not secure
So, in short: it does not fit the requirements for web technology integrated into the Eclipse packages.
However, we share the vision and mission of Make Technology (the Chromium committers – thank you!) to head for a proper Chromium integration in Eclipse and SWT. Such a proper
(bud difficult to achieve) integration of Chromium into the Eclipse Packages would make it a lot easier …
- … provide a reliable renderer for any Eclipse IDE user independent of his individual OSS (with Edge, Webkit, Safari,
and so on as OS system browser);
- … catch up with the current market trend, in which browsing is largely dominated by Chromium (so, it is the basic core
technology for any kind of web front-ends);
- … thus, make it way easier for Eclipse developers and users to build browser/web-based UIs for/with the Eclipse IDE.
Surely, such a Chromium integration must be (i) work for the vast majority of Eclipse users and (ii) updated and maintained properly (ideally, closely to the Chromium release
cycle, at least every 3 months jointly with the Eclipse release cycle).
That said: We have started a r&d project to work on this! We have already started last year. Truth be told: So far, we have failed. – Our implementation works for Windows and
as a prototype for Linux, but we still have substantial issues with MacOS (e.g. dynamic loading from Chromium or the Offscreen rendering). We are still facing substantial hurdles, but are confident that all remained issues can be solved properly. – And btw,
any help on this is highly appreciated! (Even if it is just a chat among SWT/front-end experts – we’ll then take gladly care of the further implantation work until we can offer the package maintainer a suitable solution for a Chromium integration into the
Eclipse IDE.)
In the meantime, we agree to remove the current implementation of the older Chromium version from the Eclipse packages.