Caniwebview.com – Like Caniuse but for Webviews

https://caniwebview.com/

by AshleysBrain • 2 years ago

195 56 2 years ago

caniwebview.com

yoav• 2 years ago

I’ve been building electrobun which uses the native webview.

This is really useful and well timed.

Thank you!

afavour3• 2 years 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!

niklasmerz7• 2 years 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/iss...

joshka• 2 years ago

I was sincerely hoping this would just be the static answer "No"

https://shouldiwebview.com/ doesn't yet resolve...

Spivak• 2 years ago

Webview isn't the same thing as the In App Browser that everyone hates.

jwells89• 2 years 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• 2 years 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

niklasmerz7• 2 years ago

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

weard_beard• 2 years ago

Id like one for public transit…

Canibus

Or perhaps one for availability of Nintendo game emulators…

Canines

halfjoking• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

itslennysfault• 2 years 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/ ). Looks like a total of 7 pages. Hope to see this page evolve over time.

niklasmerz7• 2 years ago

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

Sytten• 2 years 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• 2 years 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/

c-hendricks• 2 years 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• 2 years 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 and code here: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox - But we have yet to release a developer API. Seeing this, we will double our efforts!

aantix8• 2 years ago

I have no idea what Caniuse is.

Please clarify the title.

cornedor• 2 years ago

https://caniuse.com/

An overview of features that are supported in browsers

aantix8• 2 years 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.

1-6• 2 years ago

Agree. The web these days just assumes you know. Being detached from the internet for 10 years would probably have more drastic consequences than people realize.

no_wizard2• 2 years ago

familiarity with tools being assumed given the HN audience I don't think is a big issue. No issue with asking I've found if one isn't sure, usually someone will answer!

afavour3• 2 years ago

There’s a middle ground to be struck here. CanIUse is a very frequently cited web development tool, if you’re not a web developer you might not know of it and that’s absolutely fine. I don’t think every web site has to assume the user has been offline for ten years before getting to the meat of their purpose.

b33j0r• 2 years ago

Can I X, is a question about the readiness/compliance of a certain thing at time = now. Can I use CSS version X was the iconic early meme.

https://caniuse.com/?search=css3

For a generalized example, if you wanted to know if the basketball courts were ready for you to “ball it up” in a certain city, it’d be caniball.com

If you want to know if you can use a certain frontend technology, the idea is like: canwefigma?

It’s a glorified feature matrix, and usually a project of a passionate community. I approve, even if some of the memes are a bit dank.

superkuh• 2 years ago

I know what caniuse is but I have no idea what a webview is. What is a webview?

m12k• 2 years ago

A webview is an embedded browser view within a native application. As an end user, you typically encounter them during the login, "pay with credit card" and "terms of service" sections of mobile apps.

niklasmerz7• 2 years ago

This is a good hint. We might want to add a better description on the site, too.

scriptkiddy• 2 years ago

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

niklasmerz7• 2 years 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

aragonite3• 2 years 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_downs2• 2 years ago

As someone who doesn't use webviews, why is this such a necessary feature?

afavour3• 2 years 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.

aragonite3• 2 years 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#issuecommen...

Edit: fixed the link

jefftk• 2 years ago

That seems pretty easy to abuse for click jacking?

aragonite3• 2 years ago

I hadn't thought of that! Possibly. I wasn't thinking of the use case of loading external websites in webviews.

synergy20• 2 years 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 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• 2 years 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?

niklasmerz7• 2 years 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.

xucian• 2 years ago

hey, unrelated, but found your another question here: 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

RupertWiser• 2 years 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/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/

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 :)

niklasmerz7• 2 years 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

Caniwebview.com – Like Caniuse but for Webviews

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