Comment by DarkmSparks

16 hours ago

I know its a tangent, but the idea that maybe ripping out android webview into a standalone cross platform project in its own right pops into my head everytime this problem arises. Keep meaning to check if anyones actually done it already.

3 comments

DarkmSparks

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exikyut  12 hours ago

Google themselves actually have gone vaguely in the direction you're thinking, kind of, in the form of Cobalt: a stripped-down copy of Chromium that has specific, deliberate "quirks" that minimize memory allocation/ballooning in long-running applications.

Google uses it to power YouTube TV.

Unfortunately, while I'm sure I downloaded a Linux X11 binary a while back to play with, I can't find anything of the like available anymore. The release packages just contain a shared library, and the containers in the registry are just full of compiler toolchains (I installed ncdu in them and checked).

The whole system is mired/buried in layers of hardware integration fluff (because Cobalt is meant to be embedded in set-top boxes) and there is very little in the way of batteries-included demos, potentially to keep the product from gaining cottage-industry traction on older systems. Which does make sense, given that there are specific CSS rules that Cobalt doesn't follow the spec on, and I'm not sure where where its JS support is at.

https://developers.google.com/youtube/cobalt

The compilation docs are about as dense as Chromium's are -.-

https://developers.google.com/youtube/cobalt/docs/developmen...

flexagoon  15 hours ago

What do you mean by that? WebView is just Chrome embedded inside of an Android app. Same thing already exists on Windows (Edge WebView2), macOS (WKWebView) and Linux (WebKitGTK). There's also a library that wraps all of them into a single interface:

https://github.com/webview/webview

The entire point of WebView is that it's a browser embedded inside of a different application, how do you expect it to be a "standalone project"?