Linux support

[damodaranr]

When can we expect WebView2 to be available on Linux (ubuntu) now that Microsoft Edge Chromium is officially available on Linux.

AB#27465288

[RChrisCoble]

Microsoft doesn't care about Linux desktop - just look at Teams client, it's years behind in features.

Lol. Teams native client in Linux is EOL even now. They’re doing a progressive web app instead.

Well yeah, MS is doing PWA's for Outlook and Teams, and I assume the rest of the Office suite eventually to have a single code base and UI layer cross platform. We're just asking for that support on Linux as well.

I've been running the "One Outlook" PWA for months now, it's just a bunch of WebView2's. Support for this on Linux 'should' be trivial since Edge is supported on Linux already.

[gamelaster]

@RChrisCoble well, yes, Edge is supported on Linux, but it even doesn't have VA-API support enabled (literally, one compilation switch to enable it), so all video and audio stuff is software accelerated, so Teams or anything can be pretty slow on low-end pc

[RChrisCoble]

Thanks for that info. For our UC's, we don't have streaming video, we just want to run on the smallest hardware possible on Linux. We're demoing our Blazor solution today running on Pi based hardware and it works, albeit slowly. I'm hoping if we can run it as Blazor Hybrid with the business logic outside of the browser, performance would be more than acceptable.

[champnic]

Hey all - We don't currently have a timeline for when we would begin this work. Unfortunately it's very unlikely to be soon.

[pboushy]

Lol. Teams native client in Linux is EOL even now. They’re doing a progressive web app instead.

Well yeah, MS is doing PWA's for Outlook and Teams, and I assume the rest of the Office suite eventually to have a single code base and UI layer cross platform. We're just asking for that support on Linux as well.

I've been running the "One Outlook" PWA for months now, it's just a bunch of WebView2's. Support for this on Linux 'should' be trivial since Edge is supported on Linux already.

“One Outlook” and PWA are very different. “One Outlook” last I read up on it was written using Microsoft’s new unified code base which is C++

but yeah, totally agree that having a unified consistent app across all platforms would be ideal. I think they’re attempting to do that for Teams for Linux by using a PWA and focusing on improving that PWA instead of dealing with the complexities of maintaining electron or whatever underlying solution for Teams native.

by using the PWA, they leave the complexities of getting it to run on Linux to the browser that the PWA is loaded in.

[intrnl]

please keep off-topic discussions out of this. people follow this issue thread because they're interested on seeing WebView2 on Linux :)

[geckolinux]

It's a pity that Linux won't be supported any time soon with the new method. But what about the current Electron app wrapper, will that at least continue to be supported for Linux?

[ajtruckle]

@champnic I just had a user tell me they can no longer use my software. They were using Wine on Linux. I have not read all these posts but it seems that his pc configuration is not on the roadmap for support?

[champnic]

If you had a specific issue or crash that's happening in the Wine on Linux scenario we could try to take a quick look in a new issue. But generally speaking Linux support or Wine on Linux isn't coming for a while.

[gamelaster]

@champnic there was some time ago issue, where V8 engine was crashing the CEF and Chromium due using security stuff, which Wine have fixed. As far as I remember, the updated V8 version should be since Chromium v110.

[ajtruckle]

@gamelaster Are you implying that it is now possible to find a way to get the runtime running on Wine?

[leaanthony]

If you had a specific issue or crash that's happening in the Wine on Linux scenario we could try to take a quick look in a new issue. But generally speaking Linux support or Wine on Linux isn't coming for a while.

Oh that's a shame. You'd absolutely dominate the Linux space considering the alternatives. It's a huge problem.

[rtmann]

For UI's in my apps, I've been using Photino V2: https://docs.tryphotino.io/What's-New-in-V2

https://github.com/tryphotino/photino.NET

Would love to have WebView2 so packages like Photino can be WAY better though....

[gilvbp]

@champnic thanks for Mac Teams 2.0 (https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/1314#issuecomment-1751265475), any schedule date for the Linux release?

[lukurde]

"New Teams" just dropped with the new shiny architecture:

We've been promised WebView2 for Linux for years. Any updates on the roadmap?

[grilo88]

The world immediately needs WebView2 running on Linux. Agility please!

[leaanthony]

The webview story for Linux is somewhat of a dog's breakfast. This would dominate.

[DoubleDBE]

bot added the priority-low label 3 weeks ago

Great 🙄

We need this ASAP!

[jaruba]

@DoubleDBE while i don't work at MS, I do not expect it to come to Linux prior to coming to MacOS (because Linux is, unfortunately, the least used of the 3 major OS options)

and MacOS support is also stuck with no official answer: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/1314

i am following both threads as we were hoping to move our cross-platform app to WebView2

[dbidwell94]

It'd be super nice to have this on Linux. Webkit2gtk is lacking so many features which are stated as "not planned". So many dependencies require it, it'd be nice to have a framework which has industry standard features like FIDO2 / Webauth.

[novac42]

Hi everyone, After careful consideration and review of our long-term product strategy, we have decided to discontinue plans for a public release of WebView2 on Linux to focus on providing the most value to our customers on currently supported platforms. Thank you for being a valued member of this community and sharing your feedback. In the meantime, if you have any other questions or suggestions, feel free to share them with us. Your input is valuable as we continue to improve WebView2. Thank you for your understanding!

[leaanthony]

This space is ripe for the picking. And that project will get ported to windows. And that means trouble for webview2. Dealing with multiple webviews per platform is a PITA. Someone will dominate this space and it looks unlikely to be Microsoft.

[dbidwell94]

All eyes on Firefox..

[SergioRibera]

It's sad what they are announcing, but honestly it was to be expected

All eyes on Firefox..

My recommendation is that all the support that there was in this issue is transferred in efforts to improve servo, they have many open source libraries regarding web rendering that can be great and I also recommend taking a look at Tauri as in their plans is to make a rendering system itself, additionally I leave other interesting projects that may be better than what we were expecting or at least are Open Source.

• Servo: Servo, the embeddable, independent, memory-safe, modular, parallel web rendering engine. Nothing more to add, it speaks for itself.
• Servo WebRender: A GPU-based renderer for the web. As far as I have been reviewing it, it has a lot of potential as a library and has many fields of use, even as a replacement for end2end libraries.
• Gosub browser: Immature for now but very promising in terms of webview library

If you know of any other, please comment so that together we can help these projects grow, for now I only know of these and for me they are the best so far.

[vid]

No surprise to know that Microsoft can't be trusted, not only in not releasing fully open software, but also preventing and short circuiting it. People, get on your governments to stop the total capture of critical systems by one company.

[sing-ideas]

Not good. We were waiting of the Linux release, if not for public release, then are you going to release internally?

[gamelaster]

Well, to be honest, not surprised. Microsoft Edge for Linux is not maintained at all, they still did not enabled VA-API support (so no hw video decode acceleration, very good for low-end devices!) and it feels like whole Linux support of the Edge is based only on Chromium team work. It's shame...

[sing-ideas]

Hi everyone, After careful consideration and review of our long-term product strategy, we have decided to discontinue plans for a public release of WebView2 on Linux to focus on providing the most value to our customers on currently supported platforms. Thank you for being a valued member of this community and sharing your feedback. In the meantime, if you have any other questions or suggestions, feel free to share them with us. Your input is valuable as we continue to improve WebView2. Thank you for your understanding!

What are going to do with internal release?

[gza]

What's next ? VScode will move to WebView2 and stop to be available on Linux ?

[leaanthony]

I get the difficulty porting to Linux. It's the most difficult and time consuming target platform where the support burden is enormous. I don't necessarily blame Microsoft for this, but the warring factions of the Linux ecosystem who keep doing their own thing under the guise of choice and ideology, leaving developers with only one choice: having to deal with all the different distros, library versions and lack of standard APIs. If that problem was sorted, I'd bet that this issue would not be closed.

I'm just saying, don't take this at face value. It can be unfathomably hard to properly support Linux, especially if your motivation is making a profit.

[ERmilburn02]

If that problem was sorted, I'd bet that this issue would not be closed.

@leaanthony Counter argument: they also closed the Mac issue, #1314

[leaanthony]

@leaanthony Counter argument: they also closed the Mac issue, #1314

Well.. there may be more than one reason 😅 Perhaps it would have diminished @champnic 's ability to provide god-tier support for Windows webview2

[gamelaster]

@leaanthony I can be wrong, tbh, I don't know the exact architecture of WebView2 technology, but since it's based on Chromium, where I guess they use it's window and rendering code, many painful porting stuff are done by Chromium team. I would totally agree if WebView2 uses legacy Edge's custom rendering engine, that would be full port. But Chromium engine, which have so-so Linux support... (please correct me if I am wrong)

[leaanthony]

Even just picking a windowing system is a PITA. GTK? QT? Gnome gods in their own little world making decisions like windows can't be centred. Some features working on some distros and not others because they're running Wayland.

I'll leave it there.

Edit: ironically this would be less of an issue if Microsoft released a distro... Past me would kill me for saying that 😅😅😅

[gamelaster]

@leaanthony yes, of course, I am aware of those pains of windowing systems and display servers. What I meant is, that all this is already solved by Chromium engine, with it's Ozone (windowing) and Skia (rendering).

[leaanthony]

Presumably there's more to it then 🤔

[lhanson]

the warring factions of the Linux ecosystem who keep doing their own thing under the guise of choice and ideology, leaving developers with only one choice: having to deal with all the different distros, library versions and lack of standard APIs. If that problem was sorted, I'd bet that this issue would not be closed.

"Warring ideologies" is a pretty disingenuous way to look at it. Multiple options are available without a single monopoly dictating the direction of libraries and frameworks. This means one team can't unilaterally decide that a certain technology won't be supported on Linux. That also allows the MS team the ability to choose the best option. Yes, there are challenges involved in an open ecosystem vs. a walled garden, but I think those are vastly outweighed by the opportunities.

I'm just saying, don't take this at face value. It can be unfathomably hard to properly support Linux, especially if your motivation is making a profit.

It's not "unfathomably hard", it's just unprofitable. And that's fine, we expect that from Microsoft, but many of us have not forgotten the "Microsoft :heart: Linux" propaganda and can't help but to view their promises of Linux support with a healthy degree of skepticism. And things like this absolutely influence what technologies we'll recommend our organizations depend on and which we avoid.

[symbiogenesis]

Such a silly decision for Microsoft. You are building so many web apps for linux like Teams, VS Code, Azure Data Studio, etc. And you already offer Edge for Linux. I guess you just don't want these products to work well. Such a Gates-era decision. A reminder of the bad Microsoft from before.

As a .NET developer and Linux user, perhaps I should reconsider using Microsoft technologies.

There's a plethora of other IDEs and developer frameworks to choose from that aren't intentionally hobbled.

[bukowa]

Please summon the right person, in the right place, at the right time, with great passion and vision, to make it happen.

[vlad-lubenskyi]

It's sad to hear that Microsoft decided to reject this idea. Frankly speaking, .NET could have become just the best for cross-platform apps. Mature tech, millions of developers, everything you need (sigh).

Anyway, for those of you in need, there are two options available for Linux atm: DotNetBrowser and CefGlue. The former is a commercial component, and the latter is based on CEF and open-source. Both work with Avalonia.