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aldousd66611/04/20257 repliesview on HN

Nobody wants a damn web view. If I'm clicking off to a link, I may want to click to another app and back in and still be where it was... If it's in a webview that's gone as soon as I click out. Yes, you can open in Chrome or whatever, open in a browser, but that's a pain in the ass to do an the time. I hate web views, in all forms.


Replies

stillatit11/04/2025

>Nobody wants a damn web view.

OP here. This might be a classic Hacker News sentiment that's not shared by normal users. Being able to instantly return to where you were without having to navigate apps is probably appreciated by a lot of people. (As would be preloading in this instance).

FWIW when I first started browsing HN a common complaint was websites being mobile sized. The sentiment here was they should be rendered in full desktop and require pinch-zooming and scrolling in all directions.

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fusslo11/04/2025

I dont know if this is in the same vein, but I want to complain about how websites handle pdfs.

Slack, Teams, confluence, jira, etc all open a pdf in a in-browser preview thing. Then if you try scrolling, it makes the PAGE contents bigger, but does NOT zoom into the pdf.

Who thought of this? Who thought it was a good idea?

Never have I wanted to open a preview of the pdf.

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bradly11/04/2025

Similarly... I _really_ dislike clicking a link in Safari on iOS and it opening an App instead of going to the web page. I have the YouTube app installed and use it on occasion, but its really jarring when I click an organic search result in Duck and get launched into an app that may not have the same privacy settings my browser is setup with.

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emehrkay11/04/2025

I clicked a link in IG once and and it opened via a webveiw. it was one of those "give us your email for a discount" popups so I put in "[email protected]" and at a later date, IG asked if I wanted to associate that email with my account (or something along those lines). I tend to take the extra step to "open in native browser" whenever webveiws popup

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tracker111/04/2025

In the settings you can configure to open in the configured external browser. I recently switched phones, so had to adjust several apps for this. It's a pain and would be nice if it was a global setting to always open links in the browser.

carlosjobim11/04/2025

Why would the web view be gone after you've multi tasked? On my phone the web view stays open inside the parent app.

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chairmansteve11/04/2025

You know what to do..... ')