Hacker News Reader

strange question...but if you were to create a new mobile browser for android (with some custom features), would you recommend Chromium or Cobalt ?

View on HN

Cobalt isn't a great fit for general-purpose web browsing because it only supports a subset of HTML--lots of websites would appear broken. It's really meant for webapps you've designed with Cobalt in mind.

Check out the supported features:

https://cobalt.dev/development/reference/supported-features....

That… sounds absolutely amazing. Very specific purpose yes but wow, the amount of times I've needed a stripped down HTML engine that doesn't suck.

I suspect this could make an excellent renderer for an app doing markdown previews, CHM files, ebooks and such for example.

no <canvas> though ;-(

Can you get Cobalt to return an error status "HTML outside of supported subset - need full browser", for applications where you need a fast-launching embedded browser?

Is there some tool for evaluating pages for "will they run in Cobalt"?

I can see uses for this if you can do that. If you can't, it's limited to sites designed for it.

Chromium. Cobalt doesn't work for the majority of websites.

Websites kind of have to be built specifically for Cobalt to work well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com