With Android 4.4 KitKat, WebView is now handled by Chrome
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.