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Chrome is the webview for all apps, might be tricky to remove.
by muro 8y ago
Chrome is the webview for all apps, might be tricky to remove.
- ashleyn 8y agoBoy, this is really starting to remind me of the controversy over bundling IE in Windows 98. Makes me think that all products eventually end up as bloated due to market pressure.
- TheRealPomax 8y agoIt's not, though. WebView is the built in web view mechanism for all apps that don't want to roll their own web view, and Chrome for Android is a browser that makes use of that WebView mechanism. Strictly speaking, a browser is just an interface that lets you interact with web pages. And you're not locked into WebView: if you actually wrote your own, you're entirely free to deploy it. It's just insanely hard to write a web render engine these days so for most people there's no point in the slightest: it just makes your application bigger. One example where it _does_ make sense is Firefox for Android, which comes with its own engine, because as long as the Android core classes area available, it should be able to run. Not "stop working" just because someone tailored their Android build to not include WebView.
- muro 8y agoI understand your point and you are right. There is a difference between theory and practice - in practice, it is Chrome.
- TheRealPomax 8y agoPlainly no: in practice, it is the Android SDK WebView class, not the 140MB Chrome app.
- muro 8y agoFrom Google search results: Android WebView is a system component powered by Chrome that allows Android apps to display web content
- snaky 8y agoYou can install Bromite (un-googled Chromium) WebView from f-droid repository https://www.bromite.org/fdroid https://www.bromite.org/fdroid
- muro 8y agoWhen you write an app, will you test that it works with that?