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by bfred_it 2738 days ago
Nitpick: They don't "use WebKit" but Safari itself. They can only offer "web views" (which are always just Safari)

Edit: maybe this isn't entirely correct, Apple calls them WebKit APIs in their docs. Only the latest view is actually called `SFSafariViewController`
1 comments
saagarjha 2738 days ago
Most standalone browsers use WKWebView, which is a WebKit-based UI component that applications can interact with. SFSafariViewController is more appropriate for in-app browsers, because it provides UI and has very few customization points.
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jeffbax 2738 days ago
Most small apps have ditched the web view for safari due to speed, maintenance, and integration with things like password management and content blocker support - but the big guys like Google and FB which don't want to support an ad blocking vector or native share extensions still tend to use the WK framework.
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untog 2738 days ago
WkWebView is used a lot in apps to present content that isn't immediately obviously web content, rather it is just using HTML/CSS as a presentation layer. One example is the activity feed in Instagram - I only know this because once upon a time the page lost CSS on a reload and I got to see it in all its link-blue-bordered glory.

The Safari controller is for when you're linking out to an external web site and want the user to behave the way they would in a normal browsing session.

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saagarjha 2738 days ago
A notable reason to use UIWebView is that it allows for changing network requests (for example, to add special headers). WKWebView does not because it runs out-of-process. So some of the web views you're seeing might actually be UIWebViews, depending on the context you're seeing them in.
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untog 2738 days ago
WKWebView now does allow that, in a roundabout way, through WKURLSchemeHandler.
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saagarjha 2738 days ago
It seems like this can only be used to support URL schemes "that WebKit doesn't know how to handle"?
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saagarjha 2738 days ago
Like I mentioned, SFSafariViewController and WKWebView serve fundamentally different purposes; the former is for when you are trying to open a link and don't particularly care how it would be shown, and this would replace your own custom in-app browser implementation or opening links in Safari. The latter is used when you want to display a webpage and have full control over the content and the surrounding chrome, which makes it useful as both a general-purpose embedding view as well as the centerpiece of your browser app.
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