<story><title>W3C Proposes the Creation of a WebView Community Group</title><url>https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-new-work/2022Mar/0004.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kilian</author><text>Interesting. As someone using webviews extensively[1], the main issue is that the &amp;quot;iframe&amp;quot; model of security many operate on makes sense on the web, but not in native apps. When it comes to embedding third party content with iframes, you essentially want two-way security and privacy. The embedder can&amp;#x27;t change things in the embedded and vice versa.&lt;p&gt;With webviews however, that model doesn&amp;#x27;t make much sense: the embedder is controlling the webview and frequently needs to apply or enrich the embedded view. Browsers (which by and large maintain these webview APIs) have no incentive to stray from the web model of security though: they have no use for it themselves and it creates new vectors for security breaches in them. So I wonder how much a community group can affect.&lt;p&gt;[1] I build a browser for devs which uses webviews, &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;polypane.app&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;polypane.app&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>W3C Proposes the Creation of a WebView Community Group</title><url>https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-new-work/2022Mar/0004.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tetch</author><text>Looks like this has already been created, back in March?&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s their charter: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;WebView-CG&amp;#x2F;charter&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;main&amp;#x2F;charter.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;WebView-CG&amp;#x2F;charter&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;main&amp;#x2F;charter.md&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;This reminds me, back when I used to do app security, one of the issues with webviews was that some apps would hide much of the UI that users are used to seeing in browsers to make security decisions. So if an attacker could, via some vulnerability, redirect the site being viewed in the webview to one of their choosing, the user wouldn&amp;#x27;t be any the wiser.&lt;p&gt;I think it would generally be better if webviews, by default, have restricted navigation, and the developer has to deliberately whitelist domains they wish to view in it. Rather than having to write a navigation delegate or similar to implement their own whitelist, which most developers won&amp;#x27;t bother with.</text></comment>