[ravenstine]

I really think most of the criticism towards embedded Browser engines would be moot if there was an engine where anything unrelated to layout and rendering had to be imported piece by piece. Most of the time, we just desire what HTML and CSS give us (layout and styling) and an element node API in the DOM, or something like that. So many other things get wrapped into even the most stripped down browser engines that don't really have to do with layout and styling which increases the bloat. I don't really see why we can't have a GUI toolkit that just renders HTML and CSS and only be in the dozens of megabytes. I don't care that lots of existing Node modules wouldn't work out of the box. Give me HTML rendering without the kitchen sink. It seems we aren't capable of this. From what I can tell, this can't even be done easily enough with Servo.

[thisislife2]

That's what Sciter does - https://sciter.com/ - it just gives you a lightweight HTML / CSS / Javascript "webview" engine for layout and rendering. Like you pointed out, that should be enough. But corporates want a "webview" that is an OS so that they can do everything with Javascript on it (hence why embedded Chrome with NodeJS is so popular).