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With Android 4.4 KitKat, WebView is now handled by Chrome

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Android KitKat

For those of you who don’t know, Android WebView is the feature that opening web content within an application. This feature can be a bit faulty, though. This is why Android 4.4 KitKat brings a huge improvement by powering WebView with Chromium. The new Chromium-based WebView will improve the experience by supporting many of the features you can find on the Chrome browser.

I don’t know about you, but I am glad to see this coming. I have found WebView to be pretty faulty as it is. I often find that pages load much slower in WebView compared to the Chrome browser. If they load at all, that is.

This is one of those improvements that will be much more exciting for developers at first, but users will be able to benefit by the Chromium-based WebView indirectly. After all, that is what it’s all about. We should get current features right and smooth before we focus on the larger, experimental goodies.

[Google Chrome Developers]

Edgar Cervantes

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8 Comments

  1. Definitely great news, as it can be frustrating opening things in the eBay app at times.

  2. Yay! Laggy browser is everywhere now! Thanks a bunch Google!

  3. I just want the ability to force all pages to render as desktop format without having to manually select it from the menu with each new website.

    1. Change the user-agent.

  4. I HATE chrome. I can never scroll left and right with out it wanting to switch tabs.

    1. I have the opposite problem, I swipe left or right to change tabs and just scroll to the sides instead. :(

    2. That feature was removed a couple of months ago.

  5. If it lets me choose a default, I’d just as soon keep my non-Chrome browser, TYVM.

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