WebView/HTML5 compatibility roadmap

Patrick Martin

With more and more frequency, I am running into HTML 5 compatibility issues when using the WebView in JavaFX.

I'm using the latest (as of today) version of the Java 8 JDK which gives user agent information of:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/602.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) JavaFX/8.0 Safari/602.1

https://html5test.com/ gives a rating of:

YOUR BROWSER SCORES 322 OUT OF 555 POINTS

versus the current version of Chrome which scores:

YOUR BROWSER SCORES 518 OUT OF 555 POINTS

I'm not sure which aspects are causing the issues, though I can point to a lot of pages which fail to render correctly in WebView.

A few examples:

https://ecomfe.github.io/echarts-examples/public/editor.html?c=bubble-gradient

while

https://ecomfe.github.io/echarts-examples/public/editor.html?c=scatter-anscombe-quartet

partially renders.

The 602.1 webkit seems to have been released on December 4, 2014 with a lot of updates since.  What drives the webkit selection?  Why not migrate to the latest available more aggressively?

603.1.30 was released on March 27, 2017 with lots of improvements in support of HTML5.

Alternately, has adoption of something like JCEF as an alternative been considered?

As general HTML5 browser compliance improves, more folks are using these feature, and WebView is becoming more problematic.

Any insight into the roadmap on webkit version upgrades would be appreciated as well as any folks out there who have plugged in alternate embedded browsers.  Full WebGL support would be amazing.

I am extremely grateful for the amazing capabilities that JavaFX does have -- so don't interpret any of this as criticism.

Thanks!

- Pat

bouye-JavaNet

There will be an updated WebKit support for the upcoming JDK 9 (as of 2016-12-14):

[JDK-8166999] Update to newer version of WebKit -> Merge with WebKit trunk r197500

I guess 197500 is from march 2016 from the macOS nightly build site.

As the JDK9 features were frozen end of last year in preparation for release (which appears to be delayed anyway), do no expect updates any time soon.

As for the rest I agree, they can't keep up the pace and their support for newer releases / features is way to slow nowadays. We'll have to see how long it takes for JDK 9 updates / JDK 10 features to develop.

Patrick Martin

I tested with the JDK 9 early access release using Willow.  Unfortunately, it scores the same under the compatibility tests.

YOUR BROWSER SCORES 322 OUT OF 555 POINTS