Jan,
I created a commercial product targeted directly at embedding modern HTML5 platform capable webkit-based browsers in desktop applications. The majority of my career has been focused on creating desktop applications, and I've found that HTML5-based UIs are less expensive to create and more powerful than ones created using the traditional desktop toolkits.
We did in fact wrap Google Chrome Frame as an Active-X control on Windows, and the WebKit framework on Mac OSX. Linux is not addressed yet, as we've seen little customer demand so far. Because we re-use other libraries, the download size is much smaller than Chromium Embedded — less than 1MB versus 50MB for CEF.
We are still creating language bindings for popular web languages like Node, Ruby, and Python, but the C bindings are available, stable, tested, and deployed for my closed beta customers.
If you are interested, you can find it at
http://bellite.io — it is in open beta while we are finishing language bindings and broadening our customer base to flush out more aspects of the library. I welcome feedback on the C api and any ways we can make integration easier.
Thanks!
-Shane