`WebView` control - web and desktop support

[FeodorFitsner]

Web, iOS, Android: https://pub.dev/packages/webviewx Windows: https://pub.dev/packages/webview_windows macOS: https://github.com/akaboshinit/flutter_inline_webview_macos

https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/99597

[clstaudt]

Is WebView a way to display HTML-based plots and graphics (e.g. made with plot.ly, altair, ...), and integrate them nicely into the app layout?

[FeodorFitsner]

It can be used for that, yes.

[clstaudt]

That's great to hear. Could we get an estimate of when to expect this feature? For my project, I need to put GUI development on hold until flet supports plotting in some way, or reconsider the GUI framework. I believe support for displaying the output of established plotting libraries would be the best option.

[FeodorFitsner]

What kind of charts are you looking the most?

[clstaudt]

Nothing out of the ordinary: (Stacked) bar charts, line charts (time series), pie charts.... Ideally I want to reuse the charts I have already implemented with https://altair-viz.github.io in a flet app. We want to write apps in Python also because we want to use all the great data libraries.

[ndonkoHenri]

https://github.com/rodydavis/easy_web_view

[gbrandt]

Any ETA on this item? I need to display a Privacy Policy held on our main website in the Flet App (web only, so an iFrame is all I really need). I don't have the bandwidth to help with coding, but I can help with testing.

[adampiskorski]

I would also suggest considering https://pub.dev/packages/flutter_widget_from_html, as it's fully cross platform, still supported and provides features such as video playback, which flet still does not support and is much more difficult to support in a fully cross-platform way (assuming this plugin is fully cross-platform with video). There is also a core version, where you can only add the features you need, such as omitting audio support, as flet already supports that.

[iotgopher]

+1 on this feature - webview opens a lot of possibilities

[Stokerx]

Currently my team and I are thinking about using flet to create a desktop application but my question is if it supports webview to be able to implement it in the project?

[FeodorFitsner]

@Stokerx Thanks for your interest! As you see from this issue doing WebView for Android and iOS would be a breeze, however, AFAIK there is no a unified WebView solution for desktops. What is your use case/requirements for WebView?

[Stokerx]

@FeodorFitsner In this case it would be used to access a verification page of the government's Single Taxpayer Registry, since there is no public Api that can do that verification work, so the idea was to open that web page within the application and make the queries there.

[FeodorFitsner]

IMHO, doing that in WebView could be a challenge as you have to ensure government website works in a webview (cookies, redirect URLs, popups they might use for auth, etc.).

An easier and more "natural" approach would be opening auth website in an user-default web browser and then use localhost:<someport> (hosted in a Python app) for callback redirect and "You can now close the window" HTML response.

On Android and iOS external URL is opened in an in-app window which looks kind of nice.

[gbrandt]

Web view is a requirement to use external chat support such as chatwoot. How hard is we view in browsers?

[FeodorFitsner]

Making "good" WebViews for desktop on macOS, Windows and Linux is potentially the same amount of work and overcoming the same challenges as done by Tauri project. I could be wrong though, but it's just a feeling.

[Xynonners]

also hoping for this function, as I was planning to write a wrapper UI embedding another codebase/UI (communicate over API) into it.

[ndonkoHenri]

https://flet.dev/docs/controls/webview

[icsos]

Hello, May I ask when the desktop and browser versions of webview will be available? I am really looking forward to its use.

[FeodorFitsner]

Web WebView should be easy. macOS would be relatively easy too. Windows is kind of limited (found this https://pub.dev/packages/desktop_webview_window) - looks like it opens a new window with webview - it cannot render the page inside Flutter app.

[loafthecomputerphile]

i have been thinking about this issue and imo wouldn't embedding chromium do the job? it would work with both mac and older versions of windows and is much more backwards compatible. the downside is the increased file size. i found something similar to what i described here: https://pub.dev/packages/webview_cef

[icsos]

Wondering how this control is going...

[ndonkoHenri]

Package suggestion: https://pub.dev/packages/webview_all