Electron makes your app live inside its runtime. Its windows, its Node, its packaging. I wanted the opposite: Chromium as a library, the way you'd add SQLite.

zebkit is Blink, V8, PDFium and FFmpeg in one library you link into your own program, in C, Rust, Python or JavaScript. Your app keeps its own event loop, windows and toolkit. Where it needs the web it adds a view. It can be a window, a child of your own window (X11, NSView, HWND), or off-screen with the frames handed to you.

Against the latest Electron (45.2.1), on Linux: - 34% smaller (62 MB compressed) - cold start in 2.3 s instead of 6.6 - pages in 29% less memory - same DOM, text-layout and JavaScript speed

No Node: your app is native code, or JavaScript run on the engine's own V8.

Everything the engine would show the user or ask of the system is your app's to decide: - permissions, popups, downloads and certificates - network requests, at every stage - the window frame, so the page can be your title bar - menus, dialogs, notifications and tray icons - USB, HID and serial device pickers - screen capture

Without your code, a page gets nothing a cautious browser wouldn't give it.

For automation and AI agents, it speaks CDP as Chromium's own DevTools server, so Puppeteer, Playwright and any CDP client connect unchanged. It also runs Playwright's API natively inside the engine, with no CDP, no Node and no JSON between processes. A click takes 2 ms instead of 33 ms with Playwright on Chrome over CDP, and a screenshot 12 ms instead of 34. Playwright's own clients can attach to that with chromium.connect(), and there's an MCP server.

It also exports Chromium's own C libraries for your app (SQLite, BoringSSL, ICU, HarfBuzz, zstd and others), plus a full PDF API.

Chromium 157. Linux, macOS (Apple silicon) and Windows. cargo add zebkit, or pip install zebkit.

https://github.com/ikey4u/zebkit

I'd love feedback, especially from people who've hit Electron's or CEF's limits.

Zebkit – Chromium as an embeddable library