Comment by stillatit
3 days ago
>Nobody wants a damn web view.
OP here. This might be a classic Hacker News sentiment that's not shared by normal users. Being able to instantly return to where you were without having to navigate apps is probably appreciated by a lot of people. (As would be preloading in this instance).
FWIW when I first started browsing HN a common complaint was websites being mobile sized. The sentiment here was they should be rendered in full desktop and require pinch-zooming and scrolling in all directions.
It's not just HackerNews. I can remember when Facebook rolled out their "in-app browser", and a huge amount of content appeared on how to disable it.
That was partly due to websites being broken. You can still find some old discussions on Stack Overflow about features of their websites not working correctly in it: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27000708/file-upload-con...
Checking in - it's not possible to disable from the app anymore, is it? The preference setting is still there, but ignored, afaict.
Correct, it's ignored. I find it strange that the EU isn't looking into it.
I'm not sure the setting is even there in the FB app anymore.
That's right. Several times they sneakily reverted my preference, and I reset it. The most recent time I went to do that again and learned it's no longer possible.
You still have the fb app? You know the spied everything you browsed, right?
And if they didn't, it was not for lack of trying... What does it take for people to delete this shit?
3 replies →
> This might be a classic Hacker News sentiment that's not shared by normal users.
My wife just didn't know what a web view was (she still doesn't), but she prefers using the browser after I showed her how to "escape" Facebook's web view and open pages in Safari where the content blocker and ad blocker extensions could do their work. You probably have a point about preloading pages, but until content and ad blockers start working in all web views, then I agree with the person you're replying to: nobody wants a damn web view.
FWIW apps can use a SafariWebView IIRC to basically pass off a link to a separate Safari instance that can use autofill, content blockers, Javascript JIT, etc. but which the app doesn't have access to.
Meanwhile a WebView will show whatever HTML you throw at it, but it won't do any of that other fun stuff because the app that created it can access and manipulate the content (e.g. stealing your passwords) and the OS doesn't know if content filtering is relevant in that webview (since it's just the "show some HTML in a browser-type view" control and maybe it's important to see everything as-is). Being able to access the WebView also means the app can watch where you browse, what URLs, etc. so it can see what you're looking at even once you leave the page it opened to.
So yeah, apps can have a user-friendly experience; Telegram for the longest time used a SafariWebView so that everything was nice and neat. Then they decided to change their UI to a regular WebView and suddenly everything was full of trash again and I had to set it to "open in Safari" instead.
> Being able to instantly return to where you were without having to navigate apps is probably appreciated by a lot of people.
The back button supplied by the OS is perfectly capable of this (at least on Android I have witnessed this)
Well, Twitter/X gets this wrong too. Pretty often jumps away from what you're viewing, especially on the nav-in to a thread or nav-out from a thread actions.
Seems like something they broke themselves, then.
Something I see relatives do sometimes is they get a link to a facebook event over meta's messenger, and then they click the link and it opens in messenger's web view, which inexplicably isn't signed into facebook, so they can't view the event, and they don't understand why, as they are signed into facebook in their web browser.
They're also often very confused why they can't find links they've opened in web views in their browser's tabs or history.
In-app webviews are a usability disaster for normal users, I need to help a relative out of one at least once every few weeks.
The webviews don't have adblock so they fall for ads and scams, sometimes they don't properly follow UI scaling, they don't have the cookies or saved passwords needed to, for example, read a paywalled newspaper article that someone linked...
> The sentiment here was they should be rendered in full desktop and require pinch-zooming and scrolling in all directions.
I think you misunderstood. The problem wasn't/isn't that sites were mobile sized on mobile devices. The problem was/is sites that optimize for mobile, and look terrible or are hard to use on a desktop or laptop screen.
That's just asinine. Just because any user would like fast navigation doesn't mean privacy only matters if you know what a violation it is to ping every server in sight on user's device, with absolutely no way to prevent it.