Comment by poutine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by poutine | Hacker News Reader

GeckoView is awesome. We switched to using it with TelemetryTV (a next gen digital signage platform) and it's made our Android app a lot more compatible.

The core of our player application is a Progressive Web Application that runs everywhere and just needs a native container like Electron or a Webview to run. Our customers run on whatever hardware they want(Windows, Mac, ChromeOS, etc)and Android is a really compelling platform since there's a ton of inexpensive AndroidTV devices out there but quality is all over the place.

If you depended on the system provided Webview on AndroidTV you may get anything from version 50 to 80 of Chrome due to fragmentation of the platform and poor update habits of some manufacturers. Our app uses features like CSS grid and doesn't run on a large fraction of Webviews out there in the wild.

The system Webview also doesn't provide much control at all for customizing the browser engine. GeckoView lets you do pretty much anything allow us to support important features we provide with our Electron clients.

You also don't need to worry about a browser update causing trouble as you control when you update the browser engine.

It's a shame that iOS doesn't have something similar because it's a really horrible platform due to Apples Webview for use cases like ours.

>You also don't need to worry about a browser update causing trouble as you control when you update the browser engine.

This concerns me. Under the current google model, as long as you have a play store compatible device, you get chrome webview updates through the play store, even if the device fw is eol.

If an app developer doesn't update their app, then you can have potentially vulnerable version of geckoview lying around. I hope a decoupling/webview-style update mechanism is eventually implemented, although I don't know how feasible that is (i'm an amateur android dev)

That said, I really do like the project. And, I use firefox as my personal browser, both on principle and because it's quality software.

On many real world AndroidTV devices (I've tested a couple dozen) you definitely do NOT get Chrome updated properly even though it's supposed to.

Android is the Wild West, with all the good and bad that follows. Manufacturers are often not implementing things properly. Problem is that these devices are all over Amazon and people buy them and expect them to work. We try to steer people to good quality devices such as the Nvidia Shield but you can only do so much.

Keep in mind that GeckoView may not be used to build a browser. Rather it's often an engine used to drive an application built with web technologies. So a developers requirements for updates are different than an interactive browser of arbitrary web content.

The story is the same on the desktop with Electron. When you deploy an electron app the browser underneath it is locked in conjunction with the version of Electron.

It's still up to the app developer to be responsible and follow issues and update as required. But that's a lot less often than when you have a browser of arbitrary web content.

>On many real world AndroidTV devices

i gathered from your comment about large amts of devices still on 50 D:

I know it won't be used for external web content, but all it takes is an escape or malicious frame/xss, and boom, mass RCE.

I don't like electron for the same reason.

I'm not saying that it's a wasteland out there, it's just one element that concerns me, is all.

Still, at least this provides another option. Lesser of two evils and all that. Maybe if android was less of a mess this would be a less desirable option, but frankly I’m pretty happy there’s an alternate option regardless of whether it’s better or worse

> Keep in mind that GeckoView may not be used to build a browser. Rather it's often an engine used to drive an application built with web technologies. So a developers requirements for updates are different than an interactive browser of arbitrary web content.

It most certainly can :) the new Firefox for Android uses GeckoView.

Yep, of course.

To clarify: when I said “may not” I meant in the sense “might not” rather than it isn’t permitted.

> Under the current google model, as long as you have a play store compatible device, you get chrome webview updates through the play store, even if the device fw is eol.

lol I have a shitty tablet at home with Android 7 to tinker with and when I go on the Play Store is says that Google Chrome is not compatible with the device. It has something like Google Chrome 50 preinstalled and can't be updated.

Good luck getting an updated version of WebView.

I really need to do the same for my ionic app.

would you please write a blog post detailing how did you achieve this?

Or better provide a github repo as an example

thanks

Sorry, dont really know much about Ionic. The GeckoView site should have all you need to implement it instead of a Webview, it's pretty straight-forward.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com