What you need to know about WebView2 as a Windows 10 user

In June 2022, Microsoft announced that it would make the WebView2 runtime available for 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, TipsMake will take a look at WebView2, compare it with Electron, and the influence of WebView2 on web-based applications.

What is WebView2?

WebView2 is a control feature 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 connectivity ensures that runtimes take up a limited amount of disk space in a product if they are of the same version. Doing this ensures that the 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 several key differentiating factors that stand out.

1. Construction facility

Both technologies are based on Chromium. Although, WebView2 is more limited to work 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.

WebView, on the other hand, is a technology that acts as part of an application to display web content.

Building against 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 any application need, like access to the file system and notifications. However, WebView2 does not provide an API for its desktop applications.

Although, when it comes to languages, Electron and WebView support using JavaScript, CSS, and HTML when building apps.

3. Rendering Process

There is a slight variation in how these technologies display their applications. 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 render the app 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 assistive 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. The technology also allows developers to create web content that end users will appreciate, even though only developers can work directly with the runtime.

Since WebView2 is only available on Windows 11, working with this technology is challenging and expensive for developers with older consumer devices running Windows 10. As a result, this distribution takes the pressure off there and bridge the gap to join the WebView2 ecosystem.

Doing this also gives developers and end users more access to the many benefits of the WebView2 runtime. Some of these benefits include exposure to the web and other web development tools such as libraries; access to a complete set of native APIs that you can incorporate into your application.

In addition, with WebView2, you can add and save different codes to a codebase so that they can be reused on several platforms.

Providing the 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 because it is combined with the Edge browser; and WebView2 give native apps access to various Edge features.

Marvin Fry

Update 27 June 2023