What is the best HTML Rendering Engine to embed in an application? [closed]

Answer 1

It depends on your needs. Even Webkit can be overkill if you just want to display plain-old HTML. In some of my applications I use wxHTML instead. It's a component from wxWidgets library (not sure if you can use it without wx though). It's lightweight, supports just basic HTML stuff (some CSS support might be available in the next version), and has a really nice wxHtmlEasyPrinting control which gives nice print preview and also prints very well. As for cross-platform, wxWidgets works on Windows, Linux, Mac, and some other systems, so that would surely fit your requirements.

I don't recommend going down the Gecko road. It is possible to integrate it, but it's much harder to do than KHTML/Webkit - simply because Gecko was not built with embedding in mind.

Answer 2

I think I would suggest Safari/Chrome's WebKit engine which was derived from KHTML, the Konqueror rendering engine.

Answer 3

Try to opt for Webkit as it is used by many different browsers (Konqueror, Safari and Google chrome). This makes Webkit more versatile and more adaptable to other needs.

The development of Gecko is very tied with Firefox. A lot of modifications made to Gecko are done because Firefox dictates them. For instance, Firefox 3 decided that it was going to block all self signed certificates for security purposes. The implementation has been done into Gecko's engine which means that any application that decides to embed Gecko has this security constraint added to them.

If you can stay with Webkit as it mainly a rendering engine for HTML pages. That's been developed with the intention to be used among different web browser. While Gecko is primarily the rendering engine of a single browser which just happens to offer an API for embedding.

Answer 4

A little history might help in your decision. When Apple was considering which engine to use in making Safari they looked at Gecko, but decided to go with KHTML, fork it and called it WebKit. Their reasons for doing this was that Gecko had tons of legacy cruft still leftover from Netscape and was far more complicated.

KHTML/WebKit was newer, and thus had less legacy. It was also cleaner, quicker, and better documented.

One of the goals of Firefox 3 was to clean up the codebase and simplify it. From what I've heard they did do this, but I don't know how it compares with current iterations of WebKit. It apparently wasn't enough for Google when they made Chrome, and they have a significant stake in Firefox.

See here for more details.

Answer 5

I am biased, but if you do not mind using (LGPL-ed) Qt, what about using QtWebKit? It is fairly easy to embed, cross-platform of course, has a nice web browser demonstration, and also other related examples.

Answer 6

My understanding is Webkit is pretty good & smaller than Gecko. Gecko is supposed to have had a revamp recently which makes it fairly comparable, though.