6 ms·

Caniwebview.com – Like Caniuse but for Webviews

195 points by AshleysBrain 2y ago

yoav 2y ago
I’ve been building electrobun which uses the native webview. This is really useful and well timed. Thank you!
afavour 2y ago
I salute you for this effort, it won’t be trivial! For example, WKWebView doesn’t allow use of service workers… unless the domain you’re loading is included in the WKAppBoundDomains key of your app’s Info.plist file. Would be great to have all this info in one centralized place though!
- niklasmerz 2y ago
  That's a great point! I have opened an issue for that and we will document it at some point. https://github.com/WebView-CG/Compatibility-Data-Project/issues/17 https://github.com/WebView-CG/Compatibility-Data-Project/iss...
joshka 2y ago
I was sincerely hoping this would just be the static answer "No" https://shouldiwebview.com/ https://shouldiwebview.com/ doesn't yet resolve...
- Spivak 2y ago
  Webview isn't the same thing as the In App Browser that everyone hates.
  - jwells89 2y ago
    Additionally, not all in app browsers are custom things. Good apps use the system-provided SFSafariViewController on iOS and Custom Chrome Tabs on Android which are “real” instances of Safari and Chrome respectively and don’t allow app devs to snoop on browsing activity in the same way custom in-app browsers built with webviews do (though SFSafariViewController is better in this respect, since sessions are isolated per-app which bars cookie-based tracking whereas Custom Chrome Tabs seem to share the same browser’s session. Google also surfaces some light “engagement”APIs in theirs).
jackconsidine 2y ago
How timely. I was just trying to figure out how Webviews handled browser notifications yesterday (they don't which is obvious in hindsight I guess). That one doesn't yet resolve on this site, but I've bookmarked it
- niklasmerz 2y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion. Notifications is an important feature. I will open an issue to get this documented soon!
weard_beard 2y ago
Id like one for public transit… Canibus Or perhaps one for availability of Nintendo game emulators… Canines
- halfjoking 2y ago
  I’d like one for free speech CanIFreeSpeech User submitted topics, people can submit which platform they were censored. So on the page “Covid vaccines are unsafe” - there’d be a grid and Facebook, YouTube, etc would have red marks.
  - alexvoda 2y ago
    Yet another person who does not understand what free speech means. Proprietary platforms moderating user content on themselves is not an infringement of the users free speech rights. Proprietary platforms are not public spaces, they are private property and guests (users) have to abide by the house rules or be kicked out.
    - dvt 2y ago
      This is not true. It's quite a complicated topic that SCOTUS still has to fully adjudicate[1]. Regardless of what side you land on, the argument that "moderating user content on themselves is not an infringement of the users free speech rights" is not straightforward, given current legal debate[2][3]. The main issue is that there seem to be two competing claims to the First Amendment: users expressing their views on what some might deem the new "digital public square," and social media companies having the right to allow (or disallow) certain content on their private platforms. [1] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/the-supreme-court-will-set-an-important-precedent-for-free-speech-online https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/the-supreme-cou... [2] https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/netchoice-llc-v-paxton/ https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/netchoice-llc-v-... [3] https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/02/social-media-content-moderation-laws-come-before-supreme-court/ https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/02/social-media-content-mode...
itslennysfault 2y ago
Cool idea. Seems a little lacking. All of the following resolve on caniuse, but return nothing on this: quic, http3, webrtc, nesting (css), :not edit... I see this page seems to include everything that is supported ( https://caniwebview.com/features/ https://caniwebview.com/features/ ). Looks like a total of 7 pages. Hope to see this page evolve over time.
- niklasmerz 2y ago
  This site is still in a very early stage and we are looking for support data right now.
Sytten 2y ago
Would be nice to have webkitgtk. We have been shipping a Tauri app for the past couple years and while the idea of not shipping a chromium seems nice in practice it is very hard to have a nice experience across all OS. Linux being the hardest because webkitgtk is really not that great to be polite.
- yencabulator 2y ago
  I believe Tauri is trying to make that ideal of cross-platform webview happen with Servo. Thanks to NLNet for funding the Servo work. https://servo.org/blog/2024/01/19/embedding-update/ https://servo.org/blog/2024/01/19/embedding-update/
- c-hendricks 2y ago
  I've at least found WebKit on macOS to have the same bugs as WebKitGTK. Very random bugs that only affect WebKit, which is annoying
keepamovin 2y ago
This is great. I want to add WebWebView to the list and show 100% compatibility, because we run Chrome on the server and open a portal to it via an iframe. You can see it running here: https://browse.cloudtabs.net/signupless_sessions https://browse.cloudtabs.net/signupless_sessions and code here: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox - But we have yet to release a developer API. Seeing this, we will double our efforts!
aantix 2y ago
I have no idea what Caniuse is. Please clarify the title.
- cornedor 2y ago
  https://caniuse.com/ https://caniuse.com/ An overview of features that are supported in browsers
  - aantix 2y ago
    Even that page isn’t helpful. What is it..? From that page.. A language for in browsing testing (because of the webassembly support)? But there’s some component features, so that doesn’t appear to be the case. I’m an avid reader of HN and this is the first time I’ve seen this tool/language/lib mentioned on the front page. So I know nothing. How did this make it to the top? I can’t be the only one guessing.
    - no_wizard 2y ago
      you search a feature and it tells you what browsers support what features, such as this for CSS Grid[0] highlights which browsers support the CSS Grid specification. You can search for individual sub features as well. [0]: https://caniuse.com/css-grid https://caniuse.com/css-grid
      - aantix 2y ago
        This looks very useful. Thanks!
    - bangaladore 2y ago
      It is a website that you can type in some web technology such as " CookieStore API" and know at a glance which browsers support it and which browser versions.
      - aantix 2y ago
        That makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.
scriptkiddy 2y ago
Sounds like a very useful tool! Very hard to read on mobile though. You might want to add some responsive css.
- niklasmerz 2y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. The site is in very early stage and we don't have a final design, yet. If you want to help us with CSS etc the code is open source at: https://github.com/WebView-CG/Compatibility-Data-Project https://github.com/WebView-CG/Compatibility-Data-Project
aragonite 2y ago
One feature I look for in any webview is the ability to make parts of the UI transparent while still allowing mouse events over transparent pixels to seamlessly fall through to the window below while those events (not just clicking but hovering) over non-transparent pixels be intercepted as usual. IMO the old ActiceX IE browser control had an exceptionally good (most performant and natural) implementation of this feature. Unfortunately replicating it in chromium based webviews appears to be a lot trickier.
- peter_l_downs 2y ago
  As someone who doesn't use webviews, why is this such a necessary feature?
  - afavour 2y ago
    I imagine the OP is layering views on top of each other and wants them to all respond to clicks. I could imagine a sticky “please log in” banner at the top of a view, something like that.
  - aragonite 2y ago
    I wouldn't say it's a necessary feature, but it's particularly important for frameless & partially transparent apps with irregularly shaped UI components that interact with the mouse (see example here [1]; need to click the play button). Having an invisible rectangle around the component where mouse clicks mysteriously disappear can feel inelegant. This feature is also especially important for my own use case where I'm trying to make an app where the UI is essentially a "frame" around the screen, rather than a traditional window. It's much easier (& surprisingly efficient via the IE browser control) to simply use a single webview the size of the entire screen, render in the border regions and let mouse events fall through the transparent pixels. [1] https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/1335#issuecomment-1627768438 https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/1335#issuecommen... Edit: fixed the link
    - peter_l_downs 2y ago
      Makes sense, thank you! EDIT: degenerate example, but still a good explanation.
synergy20 2y ago
what is the webview here, is it the webview librariers on each platform instead of the browser? I tried to do some UIs with OS specific webviews and it's kind of lacking, so I ended up with EletronJS in the end which contains a full blown browser, but it's resource hungry. https://github.com/webui-dev/webui https://github.com/webui-dev/webui is another light weight option, it is a thin layer to provide you with a cross platform UI, and invokes browser to render everything, it's small yet has all the features of a true browser.
pentagrama 2y ago
Feedback: Was looking around all the site to find a section who explains what is Webview and can't find it. Should be some explanation. What is that? Like a hidden browser that comes with the different OSs?
- xucian 2y ago
  hey, unrelated, but found your another question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39877523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39877523 replying to your question from there: yes, I'm using SmartGit since 2014, and it's really good. there are others, 'more' free, or more paid -- depends on what you'd like. I'm sure you'll find logs of YT vids on this SourceTree I think it's still the most popular 'as free as it gets' UI for git. there's also Fork, GitKraken
- niklasmerz 2y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! This is indeed something we discussed in the community group maintaining this site. We need have some definitions for WebViews and it's capabilities and are planning to put them on the site. There will be a glossary explaining everything at some point.
RupertWiser 2y ago
Howdy friends, Ben here, one of the co-chairs for the WebView CG. Super chuffed to see this pop up on hackernews today! For a little context, our group is currently focusing our efforts this year on improving WebView compatibility data. The project is still very young and we’ll keep chipping away at it but please feel free to reach out and engage! You can find the repository here: https://github.com/WebView-CG/Compatibility-Data-Project/tree/main https://github.com/WebView-CG/Compatibility-Data-Project/tre... If you’re interested in joining in on the broader community discussions, you can find our group here: https://www.w3.org/community/webview/ https://www.w3.org/community/webview/ I’m currently working hard at keeping a new born alive but will be happy to answer any questions if I can a moment between diapers :)
niklasmerz 2y ago
Hi Niklas here. I'm the other Co-Chair of the W3C WebView Community group that built this site. We took heavy inspiration and code from caniemail.com and are still discussing and working on building up this site. It's a very early stage with very little content. If you want to help us feel free to check out the GitHub repository: https://github.com/WebView-CG/Compatibility-Data-Project https://github.com/WebView-CG/Compatibility-Data-Project

195 points by AshleysBrain 2y ago

yoav 2y ago

I’ve been building electrobun which uses the native webview. This is really useful and well timed. Thank you!

I salute you for this effort, it won’t be trivial! For example, WKWebView doesn’t allow use of service workers… unless the domain you’re loading is included in the WKAppBoundDomains key of your app’s Info.plist file. Would be great to have all this info in one centralized place though!

niklasmerz 2y ago
That's a great point! I have opened an issue for that and we will document it at some point. https://github.com/WebView-CG/Compatibility-Data-Project/issues/17 https://github.com/WebView-CG/Compatibility-Data-Project/iss...

joshka 2y ago

I was sincerely hoping this would just be the static answer "No" https://shouldiwebview.com/ https://shouldiwebview.com/ doesn't yet resolve...

Spivak 2y ago
Webview isn't the same thing as the In App Browser that everyone hates.
- jwells89 2y ago
  Additionally, not all in app browsers are custom things. Good apps use the system-provided SFSafariViewController on iOS and Custom Chrome Tabs on Android which are “real” instances of Safari and Chrome respectively and don’t allow app devs to snoop on browsing activity in the same way custom in-app browsers built with webviews do (though SFSafariViewController is better in this respect, since sessions are isolated per-app which bars cookie-based tracking whereas Custom Chrome Tabs seem to share the same browser’s session. Google also surfaces some light “engagement”APIs in theirs).

jackconsidine 2y ago

How timely. I was just trying to figure out how Webviews handled browser notifications yesterday (they don't which is obvious in hindsight I guess). That one doesn't yet resolve on this site, but I've bookmarked it

niklasmerz 2y ago
Thanks for the suggestion. Notifications is an important feature. I will open an issue to get this documented soon!

weard_beard 2y ago

Id like one for public transit… Canibus Or perhaps one for availability of Nintendo game emulators… Canines

halfjoking 2y ago
I’d like one for free speech CanIFreeSpeech User submitted topics, people can submit which platform they were censored. So on the page “Covid vaccines are unsafe” - there’d be a grid and Facebook, YouTube, etc would have red marks.
- alexvoda 2y ago
  Yet another person who does not understand what free speech means. Proprietary platforms moderating user content on themselves is not an infringement of the users free speech rights. Proprietary platforms are not public spaces, they are private property and guests (users) have to abide by the house rules or be kicked out.
  - dvt 2y ago
    This is not true. It's quite a complicated topic that SCOTUS still has to fully adjudicate[1]. Regardless of what side you land on, the argument that "moderating user content on themselves is not an infringement of the users free speech rights" is not straightforward, given current legal debate[2][3]. The main issue is that there seem to be two competing claims to the First Amendment: users expressing their views on what some might deem the new "digital public square," and social media companies having the right to allow (or disallow) certain content on their private platforms. [1] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/the-supreme-court-will-set-an-important-precedent-for-free-speech-online https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/the-supreme-cou... [2] https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/netchoice-llc-v-paxton/ https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/netchoice-llc-v-... [3] https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/02/social-media-content-moderation-laws-come-before-supreme-court/ https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/02/social-media-content-mode...

itslennysfault 2y ago

Cool idea. Seems a little lacking. All of the following resolve on caniuse, but return nothing on this: quic, http3, webrtc, nesting (css), :not edit... I see this page seems to include everything that is supported ( https://caniwebview.com/features/ https://caniwebview.com/features/ ). Looks like a total of 7 pages. Hope to see this page evolve over time.

niklasmerz 2y ago
This site is still in a very early stage and we are looking for support data right now.

Sytten 2y ago

Would be nice to have webkitgtk. We have been shipping a Tauri app for the past couple years and while the idea of not shipping a chromium seems nice in practice it is very hard to have a nice experience across all OS. Linux being the hardest because webkitgtk is really not that great to be polite.

yencabulator 2y ago
I believe Tauri is trying to make that ideal of cross-platform webview happen with Servo. Thanks to NLNet for funding the Servo work. https://servo.org/blog/2024/01/19/embedding-update/ https://servo.org/blog/2024/01/19/embedding-update/
c-hendricks 2y ago
I've at least found WebKit on macOS to have the same bugs as WebKitGTK. Very random bugs that only affect WebKit, which is annoying

keepamovin 2y ago

This is great. I want to add WebWebView to the list and show 100% compatibility, because we run Chrome on the server and open a portal to it via an iframe. You can see it running here: https://browse.cloudtabs.net/signupless_sessions https://browse.cloudtabs.net/signupless_sessions and code here: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox - But we have yet to release a developer API. Seeing this, we will double our efforts!

aantix 2y ago

I have no idea what Caniuse is. Please clarify the title.

cornedor 2y ago
https://caniuse.com/ https://caniuse.com/ An overview of features that are supported in browsers
- aantix 2y ago
  Even that page isn’t helpful. What is it..? From that page.. A language for in browsing testing (because of the webassembly support)? But there’s some component features, so that doesn’t appear to be the case. I’m an avid reader of HN and this is the first time I’ve seen this tool/language/lib mentioned on the front page. So I know nothing. How did this make it to the top? I can’t be the only one guessing.
  - no_wizard 2y ago
    you search a feature and it tells you what browsers support what features, such as this for CSS Grid[0] highlights which browsers support the CSS Grid specification. You can search for individual sub features as well. [0]: https://caniuse.com/css-grid https://caniuse.com/css-grid
    - aantix 2y ago
      This looks very useful. Thanks!
  - bangaladore 2y ago
    It is a website that you can type in some web technology such as " CookieStore API" and know at a glance which browsers support it and which browser versions.
    - aantix 2y ago
      That makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.

scriptkiddy 2y ago

Sounds like a very useful tool! Very hard to read on mobile though. You might want to add some responsive css.

niklasmerz 2y ago
Thanks for the feedback. The site is in very early stage and we don't have a final design, yet. If you want to help us with CSS etc the code is open source at: https://github.com/WebView-CG/Compatibility-Data-Project https://github.com/WebView-CG/Compatibility-Data-Project

aragonite 2y ago

One feature I look for in any webview is the ability to make parts of the UI transparent while still allowing mouse events over transparent pixels to seamlessly fall through to the window below while those events (not just clicking but hovering) over non-transparent pixels be intercepted as usual. IMO the old ActiceX IE browser control had an exceptionally good (most performant and natural) implementation of this feature. Unfortunately replicating it in chromium based webviews appears to be a lot trickier.

peter_l_downs 2y ago
As someone who doesn't use webviews, why is this such a necessary feature?
- afavour 2y ago
  I imagine the OP is layering views on top of each other and wants them to all respond to clicks. I could imagine a sticky “please log in” banner at the top of a view, something like that.
- aragonite 2y ago
  I wouldn't say it's a necessary feature, but it's particularly important for frameless & partially transparent apps with irregularly shaped UI components that interact with the mouse (see example here [1]; need to click the play button). Having an invisible rectangle around the component where mouse clicks mysteriously disappear can feel inelegant. This feature is also especially important for my own use case where I'm trying to make an app where the UI is essentially a "frame" around the screen, rather than a traditional window. It's much easier (& surprisingly efficient via the IE browser control) to simply use a single webview the size of the entire screen, render in the border regions and let mouse events fall through the transparent pixels. [1] https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/1335#issuecomment-1627768438 https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/1335#issuecommen... Edit: fixed the link
  - peter_l_downs 2y ago
    Makes sense, thank you! EDIT: degenerate example, but still a good explanation.

synergy20 2y ago

what is the webview here, is it the webview librariers on each platform instead of the browser? I tried to do some UIs with OS specific webviews and it's kind of lacking, so I ended up with EletronJS in the end which contains a full blown browser, but it's resource hungry. https://github.com/webui-dev/webui https://github.com/webui-dev/webui is another light weight option, it is a thin layer to provide you with a cross platform UI, and invokes browser to render everything, it's small yet has all the features of a true browser.

pentagrama 2y ago

Feedback: Was looking around all the site to find a section who explains what is Webview and can't find it. Should be some explanation. What is that? Like a hidden browser that comes with the different OSs?

xucian 2y ago
hey, unrelated, but found your another question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39877523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39877523 replying to your question from there: yes, I'm using SmartGit since 2014, and it's really good. there are others, 'more' free, or more paid -- depends on what you'd like. I'm sure you'll find logs of YT vids on this SourceTree I think it's still the most popular 'as free as it gets' UI for git. there's also Fork, GitKraken
niklasmerz 2y ago
Thanks for the feedback! This is indeed something we discussed in the community group maintaining this site. We need have some definitions for WebViews and it's capabilities and are planning to put them on the site. There will be a glossary explaining everything at some point.

RupertWiser 2y ago

Howdy friends, Ben here, one of the co-chairs for the WebView CG. Super chuffed to see this pop up on hackernews today! For a little context, our group is currently focusing our efforts this year on improving WebView compatibility data. The project is still very young and we’ll keep chipping away at it but please feel free to reach out and engage! You can find the repository here: https://github.com/WebView-CG/Compatibility-Data-Project/tree/main https://github.com/WebView-CG/Compatibility-Data-Project/tre... If you’re interested in joining in on the broader community discussions, you can find our group here: https://www.w3.org/community/webview/ https://www.w3.org/community/webview/ I’m currently working hard at keeping a new born alive but will be happy to answer any questions if I can a moment between diapers :)

niklasmerz 2y ago

Hi Niklas here. I'm the other Co-Chair of the W3C WebView Community group that built this site. We took heavy inspiration and code from caniemail.com and are still discussing and working on building up this site. It's a very early stage with very little content. If you want to help us feel free to check out the GitHub repository: https://github.com/WebView-CG/Compatibility-Data-Project https://github.com/WebView-CG/Compatibility-Data-Project