WebUI is not a web-server solution or a framework, but it allows you to use any web browser as a GUI, with your preferred language in the backend and HTML5 in the frontend. All in a lightweight portable lib.
- Parent library written in pure C
- Fully Independent (No need for any third-party runtimes)
- Lightweight ~200 Kb & Small memory footprint
- Fast binary communication protocol between WebUI and the browser (Instead of JSON)
- One header file
- Multi-platform & Multi-Browser
- Using private profile for safety
- Download the go module
go get github.com/webui-dev/go-webui/v2/@latest- Setup the WebUI C library
# Linux & macOS
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/webui-dev/go-webui/main/setup.sh)"
# Windows Powershell
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/webui-dev/go-webui/main/setup.ps1 | iexNote Checking a script from projects you don't know yet is a good practice. For this, you can check the scripts source before running it manually https://github.com/webui-dev/go-webui/blob/main/setup.sh.
# E.g., download with curl before execution curl -o setup.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/webui-dev/go-webui/main/setup.sh sh setup.sh
This approach can be useful for quick testing and for development and contribution purposes.
- Clone the repository to into a
go-webuidirectory, relative to your current path
git clone https://github.com/webui-dev/go-webui.git- Setup the WebUI C library
cd go-webui
# Setup WebUI C relative to the current path
# Linux & macOS
./setup.sh --local
# Windows Powershell
.\setup.ps1 --local- Use the local go-webui module to run examples
cp -r examples v2/
cd v2/examples
go run minimal.gopackage main
import "github.com/webui-dev/go-webui/v2"
func main() {
w := webui.NewWindow()
w.Show("<html>Hello World</html>")
webui.Wait()
}Find more examples in the examples/ directory.
To use WebUI's debug build in your Go-WebUI application, add the webui_log build tag. E.g.:
go run -tags webui_log minimal.go- Online Documentation (WIP)
Borislav Stanimirov discusses using HTML5 in the web browser as GUI at the C++ Conference 2019 (YouTube).
Web application UI design is not just about how a product looks but how it works. Using web technologies in your UI makes your product modern and professional, And a well-designed web application will help you make a solid first impression on potential customers. Great web application design also assists you in nurturing leads and increasing conversions. In addition, it makes navigating and using your web app easier for your users.
Today's web browsers have everything a modern UI needs. Web browsers are very sophisticated and optimized. Therefore, using it as a GUI will be an excellent choice. While old legacy GUI lib is complex and outdated, a WebView-based app is still an option. However, a WebView needs a huge SDK to build and many dependencies to run, and it can only provide some features like a real web browser. That is why WebUI uses real web browsers to give you full features of comprehensive web technologies while keeping your software lightweight and portable.
Think of WebUI like a WebView controller, but instead of embedding the WebView controller in your program, which makes the final program big in size, and non-portable as it needs the WebView runtimes. Instead, by using WebUI, you use a tiny static/dynamic library to run any installed web browser and use it as GUI, which makes your program small, fast, and portable. All it needs is a web browser.
| WebView | Qt | WebUI | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Runtime Dependencies on Windows | WebView2 | QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets | A Web Browser |
| Runtime Dependencies on Linux | GTK3, WebKitGTK | QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets | A Web Browser |
| Runtime Dependencies on macOS | Cocoa, WebKit | QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets | A Web Browser |
| Language | Status | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Go | ✔️ | Go-WebUI |
| Nim | ✔️ | Nim-WebUI |
| Pascal | ✔️ | Pascal-WebUI |
| Python | ✔️ | Python-WebUI |
| Rust | not complete | Rust-WebUI |
| TypeScript / JavaScript | ✔️ | Deno-WebUI |
| V | ✔️ | V-WebUI |
| Zig | not complete | Zig-WebUI |
| Browser | Windows | macOS | Linux |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mozilla Firefox | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Google Chrome | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Microsoft Edge | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Chromium | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Yandex | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Brave | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Vivaldi | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Epic | ✔️ | ✔️ | not available |
| Apple Safari | not available | coming soon | not available |
| Opera | coming soon | coming soon | coming soon |
Licensed under the MIT License.
