Chrome binraies are 600MB when publishing app

[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've read that it might be possible to use some sort of minimal version of Chromium, although I think that means a custom build of their source.

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.