Back in November 2020, the Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime was made generally available for developers on .NET 5, .NET Core, and .NET Framework. Microsoft later brought the tool to Windows 11 in 2021. Now Microsoft is integrating the tool more deeply with Windows 10 to have usage parity with Windows 11.
Specifically, on Windows 11, Microsoft Edge WebView 2 Runtime is directly a part of the OS. However, on Windows 10, Microsoft has been telling developers to distribute and install the service through their apps.
This has been successful too. Microsoft says over 400 million devices now have WebView 2 runtime through distributing applications. There are benefits to the approach as developers can use the runtime on devices that didn’t have it.
However, Microsoft says that this method also pushed up development costs and admits WebView2 developers have asked about a different approach. Now Microsoft says that WebView2 Runtime is now a part of Windows 10, making it much more reliable.
“With the rollout, we plan to cover Consumer devices with Windows 10 April 2018 or later update for Home and Pro OS editions. Managed devices are not included in the rollout.
As an end user, the WebView2 Runtime rollout will have minimal disk space impact on your device. The WebView2 Runtime and Microsoft Edge browser are “hard-linked” together, which means they only occupy the disk space of one product when they are on the same version.”
WebView2 Runtime
If you are unfamiliar with Microsoft Edge WebView2, it is a developer tool that allow dev’s to integrate web content into their applications.
With WebView2, users can create custom web-based app elements or full Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). Like Microsoft Edge, the service runs on Google’s Chromium engine. Web content created by WebView2 can be developed in CSS, HTML, and JavaScript programming languages. It is currently available for Win32, C, and C++ applications.
Tip of the day: With many reachable wireless access points popping up and disappearing again, the available networks list can become quite annoying. If needed you can use the allowed and blocked filter list of Windows to block certain WiFi networks or all unknown WiFi networks.
