The WebViews Community Group aims to identify, understand and reduce the issues arising from the use of software components (typically referred as WebViews) that are used to render Web technology-based content outside of a Web browser (Native Apps, MiniApps, etc). See the proposed charter that scopes its first expected phase of work.
WebView-CGGroup's public email, repo and wiki activity over time
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As the year winds down, I wanted to take a moment to celebrate what we’ve achieved together in 2025 and share a bit about where we’re headed next year. This year has been full of important milestones and new opportunities.
For those new here: the WebView Community Group is a W3C community group focused on improving interoperability, documentation, and developer experience across WebView implementations. WebViews power a huge number of apps—from embedded browsers to hybrid apps to MiniApps—but they often behave differently from their parent browsers, which creates headaches for developers. We’re working to change that.
What We Accomplished in 2025
caniwebview.com Project
caniwebview.com got many small usability improvements, new features, and data that make it an even better resource for developers. The biggest thing we’re still working on is showing the support of web features in a support matrix on caniwebview.com/baseline.
Testing Apps for Developers
The idea of building simple native apps for developers to test their content in WebViews came up a long time ago. With support from NLnet’s NGI Mobifree fund, we managed to build and publish CanIWebView apps for Android and iOS. A version for WebView2 is available to build yourself. These apps allow you to test different configurations of WebViews and investigate possible issues. In the future, we might add automated testing capabilities to these apps to update our WebView support data in BCD.
Defining WebViews and user agents
Although the community group has been working on this for some time now there never has been a perfect definition what a WebView is and how it relates to browsers and other user agents. We’ve had a good discussion on possible ways of defining a WebView, but there is now consensus, yet. Maybe we’ll find a good definition next year.
I was fortunate to be at TPAC again in person and wrote about that in detail on my blog.
I felt that WebViews at this TPAC were a lot more present and discussed in many sessions and hallway conversations. It was great to connect again with related communities and technologies. We discovered a lot of overlap and opportunities with MiniApps and something pretty new called Isolated Web Apps (IWA). One big challenge I’d like to address is that WebViews, MiniApps, IWA, and more need a shared space to work and communicate more effectively together.
All the work we put into documentation and WebView improvements could also benefit the very fragmented MiniApps ecosystem, which is a big deal because MiniApps are a huge market.
What’s Next for 2026
Overall, 2025 was about laying more groundwork: better tooling, better documentation, and building connections with communities facing similar challenges. WebViews are still far from standardization, but that remains my goal. We still need to identify what should be standardized and build the case for how and why to get all stakeholders interested in working on WebView standards.
Baseline!
Baseline is a great resource to learn about what features are supported. A long-term goal of the WebView Community Group is to either get WebViews incorporated in Baseline’s core browser set or define a “Baseline for WebViews”. We are closely working with the WebDX Community Group, which maintains Baseline. With great support from Tony Conway at Google, we’ve built a stopgap tool to calculate support for WebViews, and this powers the data we have about web-features on caniwebview.com today. We plan on getting this data into the official tooling very soon.
In my opinion, having a “Baseline for WebViews” would help a lot in many different ways and highlight the big compat gaps we have on different WebViews, their respective browsers, and MiniApps.
I’m pretty sure this doesn’t cover everything we did this year, but thanks for reading and for your support. None of this would be possible without the energy and creativity you bring to this community. I’m excited to see what we can achieve together in 2026!
If you want to get involved, you can join the WebView Community Group or follow our work on GitHub. We’d love to have more perspectives on WebViews.
The WebView Community Group wishes you all a wonderful new year.
As the year winds down, I wanted to take a moment to celebrate what we’ve achieved together in 2024 and share a bit about where we’re headed next year. This year has been full of incredible milestones, and it’s worth reflecting on how far we’ve come and what we can do next year.
What We Accomplished in 2024
caniwebview.com Project We launched caniwebview.com as a publicly accessible resource to document how WebViews behave across different platforms. With the valuable data we get from sources like Open Web Docs, Browser Compat Data and Baseline caniwebview can help you find out if web APIs are available for use in WebViews. You can compare WebViews, browsers and browse the compatibility information in different granularity from web features down to specific APIs
This initiative is all about helping developers understand and navigate inconsistencies to create smoother experiences. We’re excited to keep building on this momentum in the coming year.
WebView Survey We ran a small survey about WebViews with the help of W3C China. It got only a few responses, but we can learn from the questions asked on what works best for the next survey. There are a few ideas for a bigger survey or even better short surveys to gather interesting data on WebViews.
Collaborations at TPAC 2024 Our discussions at TPAC this year were a highlight. We tackled major topics like getting WebViews into the web platform baseline and brainstorming ways to shift how developers see and work with WebViews. It was fantastic to see so many engaged participants and collect great new ideas and inspirations. Moving forward, we plan to strengthen these collaborations with more focused meetings to drive these efforts toward tangible outcomes.
What’s Next for 2025
Expanding caniwebview.com We’ll continue to expand caniwebview.com, incorporating more WebViews and data. Our goal is to make it easier for developers to navigate the complex landscape of WebViews and reduce the trial-and-error currently needed to achieve consistent behavior across platforms. Historically WebView documentation, bugs and workarounds are spread all over the internet. I think caniwebview has the potential to become the go-to place for WebView developers.
Standardizing Behavioral Data A new task force will focus on standardizing behavioral data formats. By creating consistent formats, we hope to make it easier for developers to contribute data and for tools to present it in a clear and useful way. This consistency will not only benefit WebView developers but also pave the way for future standards discussions. This task force is still forming and will start with discussing specifics and expectations in a first meeting soon. The goal of this group is to ultimately improve the issues we discovered.
Targeted WebView Surveys As discussed at TPAC we are planning to run small targeted surveys to measure developer perception for example on MDN. Please stay tuned and reach out if you want to contribute.
“State of WebViews” Report We plan to create a report to showcase where WebViews are today and where they’re headed. This “State of WebViews” report will provide insights into areas of opportunity for improvement, offering a big-picture view of the ecosystem.
I’m pretty sure this doesn’t cover everything we did this year, but thanks for reading. None of this would be possible without the energy and creativity you bring to this community. I’m excited to see what we can achieve together in 2025!
The WebView Community Group chairs wish you all a happy holiday season and a wonderful new year.
The WebViews Community Group aims to identify, understand and reduce the issues arising from the use of software components (typically referred as WebViews) that are used to render Web technology-based content outside of a Web browser (Native Apps, MiniApps, etc). See the proposed charter that scopes its first expected phase of work.
This is a community initiative. This group was originally proposed on 2022-03-16 by Dominique Hazaël-Massieux. The following people supported its creation: Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, Qing An, 元彦 曹, Chris Needham, François Daoust, Peter Beverloo. W3C’s hosting of this group does not imply endorsement of the activities.
WebView-CG
