Mobile Browsers: the Best of Times, the Worst of Times

Arguably the single most important piece of software on any mobile phone is its Web browser. This is especially true on alternative mobile platforms where Web apps are often the best or only way to access essential services and functionality.

While mobile apps are increasingly targeted at just the dominant platforms, they are also increasingly built using Web technologies, making them accessible to any platform with a decent browser. The result is that Linux-based mobile platforms beyond Android and iOS have the potential to be more viable than ever before.

But the embedded browser landscape is in continual flux, with multiple offerings built on different technologies, including Blink, V8, WebKit, JavaScriptCore, Gecko, SpiderMonkey and Servo Layout. On top of these are frameworks intended to make their use more accessible to embedded systems. These include the Chromium Embedded Framework, Web Platform for Embedded, Qt WebEngine and Gecko WebView.

In this talk I'll look at the different offerings available and consider their appropriateness for mobile Linux. What features do they offer, how practical is their use and why should you choose one over another? In particular I'll look at the minimal API needed for any practical implementation, how the APIs differ across the offerings and how they can be made use of as embedded browsers in mobile applications.

To give a more complete understanding of what embedded browsers are like to use in practice, the talk will include example applications with demonstration code.