Firefox on Android uses GeckoView, which is a reusable Android library that wraps Mozilla’s Gecko browser engine. GeckoView is similar to WebView in some ways, but it has its own APIs and is not a drop-in replacement. GeckoView is full-featured, self-contained, and standards compliant.
Cool, totally missed that. But the issue of running both still applies right? Double the code. Viewing a site in a app it will use the chrome one ?
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Google does not allow a third party to implement the System WebView and the GeckoView API is not compatible with the WebView API in a very meaningful way unfortunately, so this is not possible.
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Viewing websites in Firefox for Android will use GeckoView and GeckoView only.
Android System WebView is only involved when other applications (not Firefox) calls the WebView API to display web pages. (e.g. when a Lemmy app opens an external link without launching a browser).
Double the code, issues and attack surface. A lot better way to address the issue is using the same better webview for all. Many benefits by FF will be nulled by the system webview. Feels like fake sense of security/privacy.
That is incorrect.
Firefox on Android uses GeckoView, which is a reusable Android library that wraps Mozilla’s Gecko browser engine. GeckoView is similar to WebView in some ways, but it has its own APIs and is not a drop-in replacement. GeckoView is full-featured, self-contained, and standards compliant.
Cool, totally missed that. But the issue of running both still applies right? Double the code. Viewing a site in a app it will use the chrome one ? " Google does not allow a third party to implement the System WebView and the GeckoView API is not compatible with the WebView API in a very meaningful way unfortunately, so this is not possible. "
https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview/issues/167
I should probably specified android webview in my original comment…
Viewing websites in Firefox for Android will use GeckoView and GeckoView only.
Android System WebView is only involved when other applications (not Firefox) calls the WebView API to display web pages. (e.g. when a Lemmy app opens an external link without launching a browser).
Exactly. So using both
What’s the problem with using both?
Double the code, issues and attack surface. A lot better way to address the issue is using the same better webview for all. Many benefits by FF will be nulled by the system webview. Feels like fake sense of security/privacy.
https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
Explains a lot also