Electron: Why does BrowserView has better performance then Webview?

Question

I've read about both Webview and BrowserView, They seem to do the same thing: Embed additional web content into application. I know that Electron's webview tag is based on Chromium's webview and this API is part of the deprecated Chrome Apps platform. Even Electron suggest to not use Webview and consider alternatives (iframe, BrowserView).

But what changes made BrowserView superior? I know that unlike the Webview, the BrowserView does not use another renderer process, is that why BrowserView has better performance? What are the other indicators? How is BrowserView different from Webview internally?

Answer 1

This isn't by any means a complete answer, but BrowserView was created because of various issues encountered with webview.

Here's a blog post by the people that created it:

• a new way to embed web apps with fewer bugs and improved performance
• webviews seemed to work well at first, but over time we ran into an ever growing list of issues. There were bugs in fundamental features like drag-and-drop and general performance was simply not on par with Chrome.

Electron's webview documentation says:

Electron's webview tag is based on Chromium's webview, which is undergoing dramatic architectural changes. This impacts the stability of webviews, including rendering, navigation, and event routing.

There were a number of webview bugs back in the day, though these particular ones appear to be fixed.

Here's an issue about the fate of BrowserView where a maintainer says:

<webview> still has a number of bugs. There are also architectural issues like slow auto-resizing that are unlikely to be fixed in Chromium any time soon

Here are a number of webview bugs (though you can certainly find bugs with BrowserView as well)

Also, you say:

the BrowserView does not use another renderer process

I believe I saw a reference to that somewhere as well, but I don't think that's true.

The moment you navigate the BrowserView to a page, a new renderer process is created for it.

Update: Oh, I think what's meant here is that the webview == 1 process and a BrowserView == 1 process, but you create the webview inside of another Renderer process, whereas you create the BrowserView inside of the main process. So there will be an extra process with webview.