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Comment by efortis | Hacker News Reader

Awesome! Do you know more Web Views in use?

Don't quote me on this, but I believe that Apple Music (nee iTunes) has used web views for a long time; probably over a decade. The entire thing probably isn't a web view, but my recollection is that the store components were.

Library -> Albums has some onHover feedback, which I haven't seen anywhere else.

I guess the Help documents are Web Views as well, e.g. right-click on an image.

Yes, both iTunes and Apple Music. That is why they are slow, comparatively speaking.

But they are finally rewriting Apple Music app to full native.

Unsurprisingly the App Store is another example.

I remember giving up on my Hackintosh install after the App Store started rendering without CSS, breaking update functionality. Always thought that to be a weird failure mode for a system application.

App Store was rewritten in 10.14 and it no longer uses a Web View for the main content, some Apple ID setting might still be Web Views.

Apple Music is now using a technology they developed to convert web views back to native - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30648424

On macOS 12.2 Music consumes much less RAM, and no longer has a webview process.

Wrong link?

Still remains quite slow and unresponsive in comparison to Spotify.

I think your link is wrong; are you thinking of Catalyst[1]?

I'm not an Apple insider, but Catalyst looks like the thing that was codenamed Marzipan for a while. I think it's more for converting iOS apps than web views.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/mac-catalyst/

No, it’s something internal called JET

https://9to5mac.com/2021/12/16/apple-is-rebuilding-apple-mus...

Yes, I intended to link to the 9to5mac article, but it’s too late to edit

This macOS dictionary app (Dictionary.app) also uses webviews. This will come as no surprise since it does things like in-line Wikipedia results.

A lot of Apple apps used to use Web Views on macOS: Messages, Music, TV, App Store, for example. But they have been slowly phased out. Messages in Big Sur, App Store in Mojave, Music and TV in Monterey.

Right now they are only a bunch of settings panels remaining.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com