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Today, even 64bit machines running Microsoft Windows 10 can run applications written in old platforms such as VB6. This has allowed many old desktop applications to continue working even after their manufacturers have disappeared or stopped supporting old versions of their software. However, I have recently noticed that current modern browsers such as Firefox and Chrome are starting to emit deprecation warnings when they are used for accessing old self-hosted web applications.

So, we have a situation in which the GUI of a web application is in risk to become obsolete and useless while the backend is still fully functional and compatible with new OS versions. Is there any browser that could be used for accessing old web applications? I was thinking on writing a desktop application with a particular Webkit core embedded in it, but I'm not sure if there is any alternative to this issue.

Thank you!

Claudi
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1 Answers1

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As of February 2020, the only solution I found is to use the example application available in the CEF library project, which is actually a minimal browser with basic capabilities (also printing to PDF).

To avoid building the code from scratch, one can download latest builds at http://opensource.spotify.com/cefbuilds/index.html (just look up the platform you want the binaries for). There are multiple packages available, but in particular, the sample application for Windows is found in a package with a name similar to cef_binary_79.1.36+g90301bd+chromium-79.0.3945.130_windows32_client.tar.bz2.

Once extracted the archive into a folder, an executable called cefclient.exe can be found in it. This executable accepts some command line arguments, detailed here.

The following example shows how to open a simple browser:

cefclient.exe --url=https://www.google.com

Another example for accessing to sites without a valid certificate (common on self-hosted web applications):

cefclient.exe --disable-web-security --ignore-certificate-errors --url=https://my-unsafe-site.org
Claudi
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