How to reduce the size of a custom Chrome build?

Question

We built an application to use in a showroom, where the (12) devices have no internet access. Everything was fine for a few weeks, then a “chrome is out of date” notification starts to appear everywhere.

I've tried many things for getting rid of this, but unfortunately nothing worked so far. So I followed the advice provided here: Disable "chrome is out of date" notification and try to change the code.

I was able to build chromium, but 60Go was far too much for the target devices (windows 8 embedded (64), overall space is about 80Go, and the remaining free space is around 20 Go) I tried to rebuild with more options:

is_debug = false
is_component_build = true
Symbol_level = 0
enable_nacl = false
remove_webcore_debug_symbols = true

That time, the build is "Only" 20 Go... Is there any options I can add in order to reduce the size of the build? I just need a chrome/Chromium version without the annoying notification...

edit1: 2017-05-31 * Thanks for the nw.js options, I'm sure I will use next time! Unfortunately, I can't use for this specifics case.
Edit2: 2017-06-08 *

Because I needed the MP4 video support, I've updated the configurations file with the following:

is_debug = false
is_java_debug = false
enable_iterator_debugging = false
is_official_build = true
optimize_for_size = true
target_os = "win"
is_component_build = false
target_cpu = "x64"
Symbol_level = 0
enable_nacl = false
remove_webcore_debug_symbols = true
#added for the MP4 support
proprietary_codecs = true
ffmpeg_branding = "Chrome"

The build grows up to 70 Go...

It was to huge for using in production environment. So I've try to keep only the following:

Folder:

Locales

Files:

xxx.manifest
chrome.dll
chrome_100_percent.pak
chrome_200_percent.pak
chrome_child.dll
chrome_elf.dll
chrome_watcher.dll
d3dcompiler_47.dll
icudtl.dat
libegl.dll
libGLESv2.dll
natives_blob.bin
resources.pak
snapshot_blob.bin

It's seems to works as expected, at least for what I've tested so far.

would like to know if there's arguments to use for getting only those files, or removing all the debug files.

ippi · Answer 1 · 2017-05-30T01:11:49.487

Maybe there are better alternatives out there but I'll tell you about the one I know of: NW.js It's really meant for packaging node-projects, so you can give your users a folder with a exe-file and it'll basically boot up a custom chromium instance (without any toolbars or buttons) running your index.html with any javascript. And it has been customized so you can use node (to access things like local file read/write (and about a million other things)) but I guess you won't need that.

Anyway, nothing prevents you from using it without any actual node-code. Just plain html/javascript works fine, so maybe it's what you are looking for. I've used it offline and with plenty old stuff. (From when nwjs was called node-webkit). So I'm pretty sure it won't throw any out-of-date messages at you.

I would try the hello world example just to see it running and check if it's what you need.

How to reduce the size of a custom Chrome build?

1 Answers1