Getting started with Equo Chromium
Equo Chromium is a lightweight, high-performance web browser component designed for Java applications. It allows developers to embed Chromium — the open-source project behind Google Chrome — directly into their desktop apps, enabling rich web-based user interfaces inside traditional Java UIs.
This means your app can display web pages using up-to-date HTML, CSS and JavaScript – just like a real browser – right inside your own windows. Equo Chromium is cross-platform and works on Windows, macOS, and Linux. The Equo Chromium Community Edition is free and provides a Swing/SWT Browser component that you can use in desktop Java apps.
Whether you’re building on SWT, Swing, or using no UI toolkit at all, Equo Chromium adapts to your environment and brings modern web rendering to your Java project with ease. This guide introduces the different ways you can integrate and run Equo Chromium in your application.
Available toolkits and modes of use
Equo Chromium can be embedded as a native SWT Control, making it ideal for Eclipse RCP applications or any project that uses SWT for its user interface. |
Chromium can also be used as a Swing Component, allowing seamless integration into classic Java desktop applications built on the Swing framework. |
If your application doesn’t use any UI toolkit, you can still use Equo Chromium in a "standalone" mode. This runs Chromium as part of a plain Java application, perfect for CLI tools or backend rendering tasks. |
This mode runs Chromium completely in the background, with no UI at all. It’s perfect for automated testing, off-screen rendering, or situations where graphical output isn’t needed. |