Chrome binaries are 600MB when publishing

[nightblade9]

Hi,

I'm prototyping something like Electron.NET: a Blazor web server with embedded Chromium for the front-end.

As it happens, I'm using the binaries from this repo (chromiumembeddedframework.runtime.win-x64 from NuGet). The binaries available are huge: if you run dotnet publish, the resulting folder is around 600MB. Is it possible to reduce this somehow?

I've taken the hopefully-risk-free steps of deleting interactive_ui_tests.exe (250MB) which looks like some sort of Chromium internal testing tool. I also delete locales, other than en-US, which is the default; this saves around 40MB.

The next biggest candidate, by an order of magnitude, is chrome.exe, weighing in at around 250mb. I thought, after reading #56 , that perhaps we can use a "minimal distribution" of Chromium instead. It looks like that change went in around 2017, though, and is already included, because the NuGet packages are from a couple of weeks ago.

Is there any way to build a smaller, more lightweight version of Chromium? I understood that ElectronJS does this, but their final "hello world" distribution is around 100MB. Mine, even with the shrinkages mentioned, is around 300MB.