In June 2022, Microsoft announced that it will make the WebView2 runtime available to all Windows 10 devices running the update from at least April 2018.
The main reason is to make the benefits of technology in web content development easily accessible to Windows 10 users. Currently, WebView2 technology helps power many web applications, including Microsoft Office .
In this article, Quantrimang.com will look at WebView2, compare it with Electron and the impact of WebView2 on web-based applications.
What is WebView2?
WebView2 is a control that helps users include web technologies such as HTML and JavaScript into their content applications. This Microsoft Edge Runtime feature now works with Windows 10 operating system by default.
Microsoft Edge Connect ensures that the runtime takes up a limited amount of disk space within a product if they are the same version. Doing this ensures that WebView settings have as little impact as possible on your PC.
How is WebView2 different from the competition?
There are a few differences between WebView2 and its competitor, Electron JS, especially when comparing how they display web content. On the surface, their rendering models are quite similar. However, there are some key differentiating factors that stand out.
1. Construction facility
Both technologies are based on Chromium. Although, WebView2 is more limited in working with Microsoft Edge.
Electron allows developers to create cross-platform applications that work on the desktop, while also hosting it as a web application. This technology acts as a means of communication between the application and the desktop.
On the other hand, WebView is a technology that works as part of an application to display web content.
Building on Chromium or Edge also affects the type of platform the technology can run on. Electron works well on Mac, Linux and Windows, while the only platform for WebView2 is Windows.
2. Application programming interface
Electron has APIs for almost every application need, like file system access and notifications. However, WebView2 does not provide an API for its desktop applications.
Although, when it comes to languages, Electron and WebView support the use of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML when building applications.
3. Rendering process
There is little variation in the way these technologies display their applications. The Electron process model is divided into main process and render process.
The main process operates in the Node.js environment and serves as the entry point for individual applications. It then splits into different rendering processes that help display the application content.
Meanwhile, the WebView2 process model is usually a group consisting of different runtime processes. Each runtime process has a browser, at least one renderer, and a few other helper processes.
These help processes are often utility services such as images or sounds.
What does this mean for web-based applications?
The introduction of WebView2 on Windows 10 allows developers to exploit the full capabilities of the Edge browser. This technology also allows developers to create web content that end users will appreciate, although only developers can work directly with the runtime.
Because WebView2 is only available on Windows 11, working with this technology is challenging and expensive for developers with legacy consumer devices running Windows 10. This distribution therefore takes the pressure off that and narrow the gap to join the WebView2 ecosystem.
Doing this also gives developers and end users greater access to the many benefits of the WebView2 runtime. Some of these benefits include exposure to the web world and other web development tools such as libraries; access a complete set of native APIs that you can incorporate into your applications.
Additionally, with WebView2, you can add and save different codes into one code base so they can be reused across several platforms.
Providing WebView2 runtime on Windows 10 has benefited many developers. Therefore, it can be concluded that this technology will serve its intended purposes based on two factors.
These factors reduce disk space usage due to its integration with the Edge browser; and WebView2 gives native apps access to different Edge features.
