Enhance webView performance (should be the same performance as native Web Browser)

user_440763 0
Viewed 37953

My experience is that loading websites in a WebView is much slower than performing the same actions in the Android Web Browser. I can see that all files have been loaded in my Apache log, it will take a few seconds until the page is displayed in the WebView control, however. Opening the same page in the native Web browser will result in an immediate display. It seems that rendering is somehow crippled.

Which browser settings do we have to apply in order to achieve the same performance as loading the page in the native web browser?

Our current settings:

browserset.setLoadsImagesAutomatically(true);
browserset.setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
browserset.setDatabaseEnabled(true);
browserset.setDatabasePath("data/data/com.xxx/databases");
browserset.setDomStorageEnabled(true);
browserset.setRenderPriority(WebSettings.RenderPriority.HIGH);
browserset.setSupportZoom(false);
browserset.setUserAgentString( browserset.getUserAgentString() + " (XY ClientApp)" );
browserset.setAllowFileAccess(true);
browserset.setSavePassword(false);
browserset.setSupportMultipleWindows(false);
browserset.setAppCacheEnabled(true);
browserset.setAppCachePath("");
browserset.setAppCacheMaxSize(5*1024*1024);
webview android performance
2 Answers

I ran into a similar issue, and after some heavy debugging noticed the native browser and WebView browser seem to be using different caches.

This code can be used to disable the WebView cache, and made WebView much faster for me (though at the expense of not caching). Note that it uses private APIs, so by using it you're risking the code will break in future releases:

try
{
  Method m = CacheManager.class.getDeclaredMethod("setCacheDisabled", boolean.class);
  m.setAccessible(true);
  m.invoke(null, true);
}
catch (Throwable e)
{
  Log.i("myapp","Reflection failed", e);
}
user_5881170
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