👀 Views: 265 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-10-17

Android WebView Cross-browser Refactoring Legacy code Kotlin

I've searched everywhere and can't find a clear answer. I'm working on a personal project and While refactoring an older Android application, I've noticed the WebView integration is causing some headaches with cross-browser compatibility. The app currently loads a lot of dynamic content from the web, and I've had to deal with various quirks in how WebView renders this content across different browsers. My goal is to ensure that the application behaves consistently, but I'm running into some challenges with how to best implement this. At the moment, I'm using the `WebView` component like this: ```kotlin val webView: WebView = findViewById(R.id.my_webview) webView.settings.javaScriptEnabled = true webView.loadUrl("https://example.com") ``` This seems to work decently on Chrome, but when I test it on Firefox or even some native Android browsers, the rendering is off, and some JavaScript functionalities don’t trigger as expected. To tackle this, I explored using `WebViewClient` to intercept loading errors: ```kotlin webView.webViewClient = object : WebViewClient() { override fun onReceivedError(view: WebView, request: WebResourceRequest, error: WebResourceError) { Log.e("WebViewError", "Error: ${error.description}") } } ``` However, I’m still not satisfied with the performance and user experience across browsers. I've also checked the `WebSettings` to see if enabling caching or adjusting the User-Agent string could help, but results have been inconsistent. Another angle I've considered is using the `WebChromeClient` for improved handling of JavaScript dialogs and notifications, but I don't want to complicate the implementation unnecessarily. I came across documentation suggesting that setting a specific User-Agent string could help deliver a more uniform experience: ```kotlin webView.settings.userAgentString = "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; Pixel 3 XL) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/83.0.4103.106 Mobile Safari/537.36" ``` This helped a bit, but I’m still facing issues with features like geolocation and file uploads not functioning properly in certain browsers. I've read that implementing a `shouldOverrideUrlLoading` method can also assist in handling links correctly, but I’m hesitant about over-engineering this solution. Given all this context, I’m curious about best practices in refactoring WebView implementations for better cross-browser support. Are there specific libraries or design patterns that can help streamline this process? Any insights or recommendations would be highly appreciated! My team is using Kotlin for this REST API. Am I approaching this the right way? My team is using Kotlin for this microservice. Could this be a known issue?