Nobody wants a damn web view. If I'm clicking off to a link, I may want to click to another app and back in and still be where it was... If it's in a webview that's gone as soon as I click out. Yes, you can open in Chrome or whatever, open in a browser, but that's a pain in the ass to do an the time. I hate web views, in all forms.
OP here. This might be a classic Hacker News sentiment that's not shared by normal users. Being able to instantly return to where you were without having to navigate apps is probably appreciated by a lot of people. (As would be preloading in this instance).
FWIW when I first started browsing HN a common complaint was websites being mobile sized. The sentiment here was they should be rendered in full desktop and require pinch-zooming and scrolling in all directions.
That's right. Several times they sneakily reverted my preference, and I reset it. The most recent time I went to do that again and learned it's no longer possible.
> This might be a classic Hacker News sentiment that's not shared by normal users.
My wife just didn't know what a web view was (she still doesn't), but she prefers using the browser after I showed her how to "escape" Facebook's web view and open pages in Safari where the content blocker and ad blocker extensions could do their work. You probably have a point about preloading pages, but until content and ad blockers start working in all web views, then I agree with the person you're replying to: nobody wants a damn web view.
FWIW apps can use a SafariWebView IIRC to basically pass off a link to a separate Safari instance that can use autofill, content blockers, Javascript JIT, etc. but which the app doesn't have access to.
Meanwhile a WebView will show whatever HTML you throw at it, but it won't do any of that other fun stuff because the app that created it can access and manipulate the content (e.g. stealing your passwords) and the OS doesn't know if content filtering is relevant in that webview (since it's just the "show some HTML in a browser-type view" control and maybe it's important to see everything as-is). Being able to access the WebView also means the app can watch where you browse, what URLs, etc. so it can see what you're looking at even once you leave the page it opened to.
So yeah, apps can have a user-friendly experience; Telegram for the longest time used a SafariWebView so that everything was nice and neat. Then they decided to change their UI to a regular WebView and suddenly everything was full of trash again and I had to set it to "open in Safari" instead.
Well, Twitter/X gets this wrong too. Pretty often jumps away from what you're viewing, especially on the nav-in to a thread or nav-out from a thread actions.
Something I see relatives do sometimes is they get a link to a facebook event over meta's messenger, and then they click the link and it opens in messenger's web view, which inexplicably isn't signed into facebook, so they can't view the event, and they don't understand why, as they are signed into facebook in their web browser.
They're also often very confused why they can't find links they've opened in web views in their browser's tabs or history.
In-app webviews are a usability disaster for normal users, I need to help a relative out of one at least once every few weeks.
The webviews don't have adblock so they fall for ads and scams, sometimes they don't properly follow UI scaling, they don't have the cookies or saved passwords needed to, for example, read a paywalled newspaper article that someone linked...
> The sentiment here was they should be rendered in full desktop and require pinch-zooming and scrolling in all directions.
I think you misunderstood. The problem wasn't/isn't that sites were mobile sized on mobile devices. The problem was/is sites that optimize for mobile, and look terrible or are hard to use on a desktop or laptop screen.
That's just asinine. Just because any user would like fast navigation doesn't mean privacy only matters if you know what a violation it is to ping every server in sight on user's device, with absolutely no way to prevent it.
I dont know if this is in the same vein, but I want to complain about how websites handle pdfs.
Slack, Teams, confluence, jira, etc all open a pdf in a in-browser preview thing. Then if you try scrolling, it makes the PAGE contents bigger, but does NOT zoom into the pdf.
Who thought of this? Who thought it was a good idea?
Seriously. I have a featureful PDF viewer I am intimately familiar with. I want it to be the default for all PDFs, ever. This gimped viewer in the browser is not what I want.
Not sure how bad it is these days, but Adobe Reader used to open pretty slowly (and if you had Adobe Acrobat open your PDFs by default, it was even slower), so an in-browser PDF viewer was appreciated for that purpose.
Also, it can be useful to keep the PDF in the context of the app you opened it in. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a window manager that surfaces the fact that, for example, one macOS Preview window was opened from the browser, another from Slack, another from Finder, etc. Compare to iOS, where opening a PDF viewer from an app will result in a button at the top-left corner to go back to the app you opened it from.
> This gimped viewer in the browser is not what I want.
The previous comment was not talking about the browser viewer, it was talking about various website viewers, like the one by Jira.
I agree website viewers are pointless. But most of the time I actually like the browser viewer better, if it opens links directly, than offline viewers. Because I regard PDFs as websites (similar to jpeg files), and I normally don't want to accumulate them in my download folder.
I agree though that the browser viewers are often too bare-bones.
>The previous comment was not talking about the browser viewer, it was talking about various website viewers, like the one by Jira.
Which tend to be, imo, even worse! I think I'd rather have a toner container explode on me than try to suffer through the experience of using Aconex's PDF utility ever again.
This sounds more like however your OS handles opening the PDF mimetype(xdg-open,open,Invoke-Item) I'm assuming you're on windows. I think often times browsers will just be set to the default for previewing a PDF unless set otherwise. This is all just conjecture though as I don't use any of the tools you listed above and I'm not absolutely certain of how Windows/MacOS handles PDFs by default.
Twitter's handling of opening links in its own webview is a bit different, unless Slack, Teams, Confluence, Jira all open these browser instances within some sort of webview wrapper as well(I wouldn't think so). So its a little bit different
No, what they are talking about is that you click on a link to see a PDF in these web apps, and instead of serving up the PDF document itself, they serve up a page in their web app that embeds a PDF viewer.
I assume they are trying to be "helpful" but 99% of the time the user's browser can render the PDF more conveniently than the app's embedded viewer (not breaking scrolling and zooming etc.)
Similarly... I _really_ dislike clicking a link in Safari on iOS and it opening an App instead of going to the web page. I have the YouTube app installed and use it on occasion, but its really jarring when I click an organic search result in Duck and get launched into an app that may not have the same privacy settings my browser is setup with.
Ironically, I have the opposite complaint with YouTube, particularly with these new Twitter web views. It takes 3 “navigations” now to get to the iOS YouTube app: one to open the Twitter web view, one to open that URL in Safari, then one to open at YouTube video in the native app.
The "open in YouTube" button just does nothing in the (iOS) webview, for whatever reason. So, in order to get a working open-in-app button, you have to open the webpage in your browser. Not sure if intentional or a bug.
I end up just using YouTube through the browser and only installing the app when I need to download videos, e.g. for a plane trip, and then uninstalling it after I land.
I clicked a link in IG once and and it opened via a webveiw. it was one of those "give us your email for a discount" popups so I put in "mark@aol.com" and at a later date, IG asked if I wanted to associate that email with my account (or something along those lines). I tend to take the extra step to "open in native browser" whenever webveiws popup
In the settings you can configure to open in the configured external browser. I recently switched phones, so had to adjust several apps for this. It's a pain and would be nice if it was a global setting to always open links in the browser.
