Yes, it feels like a browser because as you say - it literally is a full blown web browser. That's by design of course, the same design choice used by practically every other major successful gaming platform out there including but not limited to Steam, Blizzard Battle.NET, Ubisoft Uplay, Desura and others. EA Origin seems to be the only major gaming service that has chosen an alternative although I haven't investigated it closely. I suspect that if they're not using CEF then they may be using Webkit or some other closely related ancestor however.

Could GOG have designed Galaxy without making it web based and without using pre-existing web technologies like Google CEF? Absolutely, they totally could have done that. As a part of their design goal it is obvious that they wanted to incorporate the GOG storefront into the design which is itself web technology, as well as various other features that are web based which would either mean they would have to design their own full blown web browser from the ground up which is completely infeasible, or they would have to develop their own alternative way of presenting this information graphically without using web technologies at all other than perhaps as a light weight downloading mechanism (using libcurl or similar).

The fact of the matter though is that no matter what kind of computer people have today, virtually everyone surfs the web using one of the mainstream web browsers, whether it is Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Edge, Safari, Opera or some fork or variant of those with a different name or some other more obscure full featured browser. They may all vary in their use of resources, but the modern web itself is very media and content rich. The majority of RAM and CPU resources used by a modern browser is comprised mostly of the actual content downloaded from the webserver. Small JPG images etc. decompress to consume many megabytes of data before they can be displayed, as do other multi-media components. The majority of the data consumption of the browser isn't the browser, but the web content itself, and it doesn't matter if it was web technology accessing it or some other technology as content rich in images, video, animation and other elements found on the modern web would use the same amount of resources more or less no matter how one went about implementing it. You need video codecs, and dozens of other technologies to make for rich experiences like that, and you can't implement something the complexity and richness of the web storefront as an experience without having that level of technology available to present it.

Since all computers run web browsers capable of all of this, they're equally capable of running a gaming client that is just a specialized version of the same thing. Sure, it will use up some RAM and CPU while it is running, but not really any more than Firefox or Chrome or some other browser would if it were running, and the client can be optimized to put itself to sleep more or less when a game is running, minimizing its own resource consumption to a degree to leave those resources available to the game. Galaxy has been optimized in recent time to greatly improve performance and reduce wasted CPU/RAM resources for example. I'm sure they can and will continue to optimize it for that in the future as well.

The number of computers out there which aren't capable of running Galaxy well is extremely small, and the same computers would equally not run any other mainstream gaming client either. I don't think it is unreasonable for GOG to develop their client for to focus on what the majority of users computers are capable of handling without limiting the technology selection to the bare minimum lowest common denominator of what someone running Windows XP on a 12 year old Pentium 4 with 2GB can handle. Likewise I don't think it is realisitic to expect GOG to develop 8 different clients to handle the oldest computer from 20 years ago up through modern computers and be able to support every possible configuration out there.

They went with the most sensible business choice that most other gaming services have in choosing web based technologies because it allows for rapid application development, and rich multimedia experiences which would be much more time consuming and manpower/resource intensive to create without using pre-baked web based technologies like Google CEF.

This is a massive undertaking they're doing now, and it already seems to be moving along slower than anyone would like. Imagine how much slower it would progress if they supported every operating system ever created since the beginning of time running on every computer that arguably could be called a PC. They essentially would be trying to please everyone and making their task immensely monumental, most likely ending up pleasing nobody and failing miserably in the end. That would be a very unrealistic goal, and not backed by economics.

Some people may not get the picture perfect scenario that they would personally like to have, especially if they use ancient hardware and OS combinations and never ever upgrade even if someone were to throw their PC off a cliff into a swamp, but it's unrealistic for people to expect GOG to go way out of their way to support that old hardware equally with modern hardware just for an extremely small and dwindling percentage of their customer base. As hard as it might be for the minority of people stuck in that situation to hear, they are a small minority that aren't worth doubling, tripling, quadrupling development engineering and costs to support. Not to mention that people who never ever upgrade their computers or operating systems are much more likely to not have a lot of money to spend in the first place. The economics just don't make sense. You have to draw a line in the sand somewhere.

From a business perspective it makes sense for GOG to develop and support one client and one client only, and to devote all of their resources focused solely on that one vision, and when the API has matured to the point where it is stable and they're willing to commit to it, to document it for others to be able to create their own clients which could be anything from full fledged like Galaxy client, to simple minimal clients like the GOGdownloader or commandline driven like gogrepo.py.

Don't get me wrong though, I understand and fully empathize with anyone who is potentially negatively impacted by some of the changes, including the prospect of losing the GOGdownloader in the future, and that's why I created the other thread to try to keep the downloader alive as long as possible. But everyone tends to look at these things all solely through their own eyes on how it affects themselves personally, and sometimes even irrationally at that. Rarely do people look at the big picture and whether it would be economically viable for a company like GOG to try to do all of the things to please every single customer that has a complaint. They'd probably go out of business by poor management in a year or less and join Desura if they let the clowns run the circus so to speak.

There is always going to be one of those "You must be taller than this line in order to ride this ride." signs when it comes to software, and even if the majority of people are above that line, there will always be people who are below the line and feel upset that they can't get on the bumper cars. It doesn't mean that something evil is at play.

Given infinite money, manpower, and time I'm sure that GOG would love nothing more than to fully support every possible operating system and computer hardware out there with everything they do. Why not? But sadly no company has infinite resources and ends up having to make hard decisions as to where to draw the line, knowing that some people will not be happy about it but they have to do it anyway and move forward regardless.

I only hope that Hybrasil sinks faster so we don't have to hear that terrible out of tune singing of obscure songs for too much longer. ;)
</obscure movie reference>