December 31, 2025

WebView Community Group Recap: 2025 and Beyond

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.

The W3C Technical Architecture Group is working on draft finding about what an user agent is. WebViews again sit in a weird spot where they can be a user agent but not in every use case. We’ve contributed feedback to the section about pieces of an application that can be a user agent.

Lots of Opportunities at TPAC 2025 in Kobe

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.

“State of WebViews” Talk

I’m excited to have a session in the new Browser and Web Platform devroom at FOSDEM 2026. My talk, State of WebViews - Can we fix things?, will give an overview of where we are today and what could be better.

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.

Cheers, Niklas