Chromium is the modern open-source browser component used by Google Chrome. It’s now the embedded browser engine of jAlbum 36.
For decades jAlbum has been using an embedded browser engine for tasks like previews, HTML editing, and the Google Maps-based location editor. The engine, supplied by Oracle is based on a framework called “WebKit”. Unfortunately, it hasn’t followed recent web standard developments, making it an increasing “pain point”. Here’s a partial list of issues it’s been facing:
- Fonts were’t rendered correctly (appearing too thin).
- 3D transition effects didn’t work.
- Previews would sometimes show stale cached data.
- The Google Maps integration stopped working.
- Keyboard slide page navigation in previews wasn’t working for Plain skin.
- Some videos wouldn’t play through the embedded preview.
- Custom cursors didn’t work.
- Copy+Paste didn’t work within the html editor.
With jAlbum 36, we’ve now fitted a modern “Chromium” based engine that’s fully standards compliant. https://html5test.co scores browser compatibility. The old browser engine only scores 371 out of 594 points. The new browser engine of v36 scores 581 out of 594 points. (This is even higher than Firefox which scores 546/594). We’ve also rewritten the location editor to be working again and fully standards-compliant. The new embedded browser has also got some new functionality:
- Full-screen mode supported
- Source code viewing
- Developer tools
You can naturally continue using an external browser for previews, but you may just find that the embedded/windowed browser is more convenient as it refreshes automatically as you play with various skin and style settings. To switch to it, open Preferences -> Preview and set “Type” to “Windowed” or “Embedded“. If you still wish to see a preview in an external browser, just ALT-click the preview button.
I wish to extend a thank you to TeamDev for providing the Java integration component for Chromium that we now use.
