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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

I like "Alastair's Grand Theory of In-App Webviews":

the main reason webviews in apps have such a bad reputation is because you don't notice the webviews that are integrated seamlessly

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I think another split is between:

- people who have gone down the webview path, and know how difficult it is to do well

- people who have been told they can simply package their webapp into a native application

You can probably guess which group has more people

I'll concede if you can name one webview that is integrated seamlessly. Maybe the average person wouldn't realise but I think we'd have seen lots of articles about it here. It would be a standard rebuttal to every webview debate, "but Foo is implemented as a webview so it can be done".

Which is probably exactly why this was added. The cheap way to usually tell if someone is using a 3rd party UI toolkit, is to start tweaking the system theming and see if the application follows some scaling/color changes correctly.

In this case some subset of apple provided apps weren't following the theme and they fixed it by adding a private css property.

Vs some other OS vendor that likely removed most of the theme controls so they didn't have to keep fixing a huge pile of 1/2 baked abandoned toolkits scattered across their product portfolio.

There's also, in there somewhere, a corollary about how you don't notice the webviews which don't stick out but just don't feel right. Like, someone mentioned Settings app in MacOS might use them because the icons don't load fast enough.

I can't help but lament just a little bit. Apple used to be about insane polish. Just think about the mentality that created the rounded screen corners on the original Mac. That's just crazy and I admire it.

> Apple used to be about insane polish.

I think that's mostly a brand narrative/myth. MacOS has always had warts at any given time.

No kidding. I grew up loving Macs in general, but despite some people's rose-tinted views of classic macOS in the 80's and 90's, I always had uncontrollable pangs of stabbiness every time I had to do anything in the cluttered, clunky, and tiny interface of Chooser.

"All toupées look fake. I've never seen one that I couldn't tell was fake."

"The Toupée Theory of In-App Webviews" is perfect. I might change it in the post.

Fwiw I think the personal attribution gives it a nice touch.

“Alastair’s Toupee’s theory of in-app WebViews”?

Totally agree with the sibling comment, you should own it! Just made me think of that quote haha.

you write really well OP! please keep it up.

Thanks! I'm hoping to continue down this path and write up some thoughts on how you might actually achieve seamless in-app webviews at some point but, y'know... time.

In the meantime (hey, it's already a thread of self-promotion) my last writeup was about the native views WKWebView generates when you use hardware accelerated CSS transforms:

https://alastair.is/learning-about-what-happens-when-you-use...

That was a great read! Thanks!

run it

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