The advertisement section of the JavaLobby newsletter contained a link to WebRenderer, which advertises itself as "WebRenderer is an embedded Java browser component. Through an innovative architecture WebRenderer provides Standards compliance that no other Java browser can match".

That sounded pretty good and something that could be useful in some projects. I registered, downloaded it and tried it. My first look into the distribution dir showed a libwebrenderer.so file (under Linux). Already I was less motivated since it obviously wasn't pure Java, but I ran it to test out that 'Standards compliance'. To my surprise it rendered the latest site I developed perfectly. This came as a shock. It uses CSS heavily, some tight javascript, transparent PNG menus, pixel-perfect layouts ... it actually looked exactly as how I had always seen it ... it looked exactly as ... Mozilla. I took another look in the distribution dir and here's what I saw: MPL (the Mozilla license) and corecomponents-linux.zip (which contains only Mozilla files).

So be warned, this is not an "embedded Java browser component" but a tiny java layer on top of a free native browser platform. It's sad to see this being marketed deliberately wrongly. The same in pure Java would really have rocked!

update: seems IECanvas does exactly the same, but for free and both for IE and Mozilla.