4 ms·

Isn't the whole point of WebView that Firefox et al can provide it as well as Chrome?

by throwaway53453 6y ago

meibo 6y ago
Yes, Firefox can act as a WebView implementation on any Android phone. Apps don't need to ship this.
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  No it can’t. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/GeckoView https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/GeckoView: “GeckoView serves a similar purpose to Android's built-in WebView, but it has its own APIs and is not a drop in replacement.” The purpose of WebView has certainly never been about using a different engine; rather, it’s to have only one copy of a browser for apps to use as a widget, rather than each app bundling its own browser which uses vast amounts of space and raises serious security concerns.
chrismorgan 6y ago
The situation I’m responding to is the suggestion that you bundle your own browser rather than using one provided by Android System WebView or equivalent.
gh-throw 6y ago
Not really, though vendors of Android can provide alternative web views (of course). Samsung used to (may still) which was a giant pain in the ass, since you'd see different behavior out of web views on Samsung versus almost any other Android device, but Samsung was too common to ignore, so if you did cross-platform apps that included web views you ended up with platform specific bugs for iOS, then for two flavors of web view on Android—and then multiply that by the many versions of Android you'd have to support, for Samsung and everyone else, versus maybe 2 versions for iOS for non-super-huge-userbase applications (where those sub-1% users not on the two most recent versions are worth spending money to support, because you have so many users that 0.5% or whatever is still a ton of people) If anyone could provide web views they'd be practically useless, as they'd just be a constant source of bugs, and everyone would simply start embedding a browser engine instead.

Isn't the whole point of WebView that Firefox et al can provide it as well as Chrome?

meibo 6y ago

Yes, Firefox can act as a WebView implementation on any Android phone. Apps don't need to ship this.

chrismorgan 6y ago
No it can’t. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/GeckoView https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/GeckoView: “GeckoView serves a similar purpose to Android's built-in WebView, but it has its own APIs and is not a drop in replacement.” The purpose of WebView has certainly never been about using a different engine; rather, it’s to have only one copy of a browser for apps to use as a widget, rather than each app bundling its own browser which uses vast amounts of space and raises serious security concerns.

chrismorgan 6y ago

The situation I’m responding to is the suggestion that you bundle your own browser rather than using one provided by Android System WebView or equivalent.

gh-throw 6y ago

Not really, though vendors of Android can provide alternative web views (of course). Samsung used to (may still) which was a giant pain in the ass, since you'd see different behavior out of web views on Samsung versus almost any other Android device, but Samsung was too common to ignore, so if you did cross-platform apps that included web views you ended up with platform specific bugs for iOS, then for two flavors of web view on Android—and then multiply that by the many versions of Android you'd have to support, for Samsung and everyone else, versus maybe 2 versions for iOS for non-super-huge-userbase applications (where those sub-1% users not on the two most recent versions are worth spending money to support, because you have so many users that 0.5% or whatever is still a ton of people) If anyone could provide web views they'd be practically useless, as they'd just be a constant source of bugs, and everyone would simply start embedding a browser engine instead.