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Comment by eric_h | Hacker News Reader

I hate every instance of the in-app browser. I always long press on a link and open it in safari whenever that's possible - those integrated browsers don't support my adblock plugin and are already slower than native safari.

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TweetBot does a reasonable job here IMHO. It allows you to choose which browser opens links by default -- it supports Firefox, Chrome, Safari as well as its own in-app browser which is a WKWebView, which means it's just as fast as native Safari and respects your content blockers. Choosing a non-default browser is possible by long pressing on a link.

EDIT - (thanks saagarjha) newer versions of Tweetbot appear to use SFSafariViewController not WKWebView.

So I've heard. I've been meaning to install TweetBot for ages, just haven't gotten around to it (and Twitter.ipa is the app in which I most often do the long press to open links).

Actually, it's not that simple. There are a couple ways to load websites on iOS:

* UIWebView: Old, slow, but dead simple.

* WKWebView: The new "WebKit" drop-in replacement for UIWebView. It uses Safari's Nitro engine, and allows for full customization for the chrome, but does not allow for content blocking. Most new apps use this.

* SFSafariViewController: A "Safari view"; you have no control over the UI chrome (or browsing history, etc.), but it uses Nitro and loads content blockers.

* Safari app: The actual app. Loads content blockers.

What advantage does using WKWebView provide for an app over SFSafariViewController? Is it just the ability to change the color and icons to match the rest of the app's style?

Or are apps generally switching over to SFSafariViewController? Curious to hear some iOS folks' thoughts on the matter since I'm uninformed.

Most notably apps can inject arbitrary JS into WKWebView, making it much easier to track The user’s actions.

You can roll your own browser interface using WKWebView — if (for whatever reason) your app supplements the browsing experience, you'd use WKWebView.

SFSafariViewController provides its own Safari-like interface and has an extremely limited set of configuration/customization options.

You may be interested in a little iOS app I wrote that gives you the native Safari experience in almost every app that supports the share sheet: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/browsecurely-secure-browsing...

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