Microsoft has announced that WebView 2 -- a developer control for embedding web content in applications -- is now generally available for Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps on Windows. One of the top asks from developers, this helps push the process of making modern apps on Windows easier since WebView2 long replaced the older EdgeHTML-based WebView in many UWP (also known as WinUI 2) apps.

According to Microsoft, PowerApps on Windows will be one of the first UWP apps to use WebView in the production version. WebView 2 will power the entire user interface experience. For those unfamiliar, PowerApps is what's used by many of Microsoft's enterprise and business customers to create and deploy apps in just a few clicks for various platforms.

"We are excited to see more apps being built on this platform and moving to a modern embedded browser control on UWP," explained the Microsoft Edge Team in a blog post.

WebView2 first hit general availability to developers back in October 2020. It's a developer control for embedding web content in applications and can help developers leverage the best of what the Microsoft Edge Chromium platform has to offer. Compared to EdgeHTML, it reduces developer load, and can also minimize disk space. This is because WebView2 Runtime and Microsoft Edge browser are “hard-linked” together and included as part of Windows 11. In Windows 10, Microsoft recommended developers distribute and install the WebView2 runtime with their applications.

There are a lot of different ways to code and write apps for Windows and this is part of the reason that Microsoft typically slowly rolls out things like this one. While some may say that Progressive Web Apps, Win32 apps, are more popular on Windows, many developers still code UWP apps, and many of Microsoft's own apps are indeed UWP. Today's news of general availability is a huge win for the platform.

Source: Microsoft