[aldousd666]

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.

[stillatit]

>Nobody wants a damn web view.

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.

[nitwit005]

It's not just HackerNews. I can remember when Facebook rolled out their "in-app browser", and a huge amount of content appeared on how to disable it.

That was partly due to websites being broken. You can still find some old discussions on Stack Overflow about features of their websites not working correctly in it: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27000708/file-upload-con...

[nozzlegear]

> 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.

[drdec]

> Being able to instantly return to where you were without having to navigate apps is probably appreciated by a lot of people.

The back button supplied by the OS is perfectly capable of this (at least on Android I have witnessed this)

[marginalia_nu]

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.

[franga2000]

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...

[thayne]

> 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.

[materialpoint]

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.

[fusslo]

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?

Never have I wanted to open a preview of the pdf.

[Arrath]

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.

[friedtofu]

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

[bradly]

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.

[tshaddox]

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.

[loloquwowndueo]

Pro tip, links clicked in private mode will always ask you before opening the app, so you can say no.

[stephen_g]

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.

[renewiltord]

Brave prompts you before doing that. Then you can long press to new tab.

[emehrkay]

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 "[e-mail]" 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

[throwaway290]

I remember how tiktok basically injected a keylogger into any site they opened in a webview https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/19/technology/tiktok-browser...

I didn't think IG does something similarly shady

[tracker1]

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.

[carlosjobim]

Why would the web view be gone after you've multi tasked? On my phone the web view stays open inside the parent app.

[minitoar]

idk but I’ve definitely experienced this. Presumably it’s a bug.

[chairmansteve]

You know what to do..... ')