Microsoft Edge WebView2 is production ready

blogs.windows.com

48 points·hellojs··7 comments

Does anyone know if this means a Webview2 runtime is shipped with Windows?

I find CGo to be a bit more painful on Windows than it is on other platforms, so one thing I’ve experimented with is a pure Go wrapper around Webview2[1] that is roughly compatible with the popular webview/webview library. When the runtime is installed by default it’ll make a huge difference. (FWIW, I would not recommend using my library as is since it lacks JS bindings support for now, but I will probably look into it again some day soon.)

[1]: https://github.com/jchv/go-webview2

In the future it will be, but for now it’s a redistributable (that will keep itself updated and is separate from Edgium)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/con...

The 1.0 SDK also (finally!) includes a static .lib version of the WebView2Loader.dll, so you may be able to convert that to a _syso and link it in directly instead of using go-winloader.

That sounds a lot less horrible :) although it was still fun to write.

That's awesome! I develop a [plugin for Unity][1] that uses the WebView component to render web content in 3D for Hololens, and I have my fingers crossed that WebView2 will bring significant performance gains. So, I'm looking forward to the UWP GA release, and I'll get started with the preview in the meantime.

[1]: https://vuplex.com

Is WebView Windows only? Or will it become an Electron competitor someday?

I think that WebView is meant to be part of the Windows SDK. Realistically, macOS and Linux/FreeBSD already have accessible OS-level Webkit interfaces. See, for example, webview/webview: https://github.com/webview/webview

Reply on news.ycombinator.com