Cordova WebView vs InAppBrowser

[Honda20]

Hi Intel Support

Can you please clearly explain the difference between Cordova WebView vs InAppBrowser

Regards

Honda20

[Anthony_H_Intel]

Hi Honda20-

CordovaWebview is the main component that your Cordova application runs in. You can think of it as something like a custom browser that provides the additional set of javascript APIs exposed by the set of Cordova plugins that you have configured for inclusion in your application.  Your application entry point (e.g., index.html) is loaded into the CordovaWebView for your Cordova application.  A default CordovaWebView implementation is provided for each platform (e.g., UIWebView on ios), but these can be swapped out for variants if so desired (e.g. WKWebView on ios).  It is also possible to roll your own CordovaWebView if you have special requirements, but for most users, the default CordovaWebView is just fine and not something that needs to be given much consideration.

InAppBrowser is one of the plugins that you can use in your Cordova application.  Typically, Cordova apps bundle their content as part of the application so that they can be run offline.  InAppBrowser provides the ability to load external web content as part of your app (although you can also load local content into InAppBrowser).  Typically this is used to display content that does not need access to Cordova APIs.  You can think of the InAppBrowser "window" as being loaded inside of the CordovaWebView.  For example, in Intel App Preview, the login page is displayed in an InAppBrowser window because it is externally hosted.  InAppBrowser is also used to display a few pages of static content such as the privacy policy and terms of use.

Hope this helps!
Tony

[PaulF_IntelCorp]

See this blog for additional background > https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2014/09/02/html5-web-app-webview-app < regarding a webview and see the inAppBrowser doc page > https://github.com/apache/cordova-plugin-inappbrowser < for details regarding that plugin.