feat: Make Crosswalk default browser for Android

[mhartington]

From @csvan on August 1, 2015 20:53

Type: feat

Platform: android 4.x webview

Apart from the app size inflation (15-20MB as of current), are there any good reasons for not making Crosswalk the default runtime for Android deployments?

Apart from the obvious boosts to overall performance and rendering, this would make overall development of the core platform easier by eliminating Webview issues specific to different Android versions. It would also make things easier for developers, since potential issues and questions can be discussed w.r.t. only a single browser.

Copied from original issue: ionic-team/ionic-framework#4176

[trazek]

It seems CrossWalk has a bug with Android 5

https://crosswalk-project.org/jira/browse/XWALK-2958

[spyjo]

What about RAM usage (and CPU) ? Compatibility of 100% of plugins and native functionality ?

[baleboy]

@trazek for the records, the actual active bug for that issue is https://crosswalk-project.org/jira/browse/XWALK-4738

Let us know (here or in our Jira) of any other bugs preventing Crosswalk from becoming the default, we'll try to prioritize.

The Crosswalk Team

[csvan]

@spyjo - I may be off, but Crosswalk should outperform the native WV in terms of both CPU and RAM usage, regardless if you run Android 4 or 5.

[spyjo]

Then, I suppose these 2 lists should be checked, to fix what needs to be fixed:
https://github.com/driftyco/ionic-cli/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+crosswalk
https://github.com/driftyco/ionic/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+crosswalk

[csvan]

As far as compatibility goes, the only problematic plugin I know is localNotifications. However, it seems to be going deeper than just Crosswalk (and the workaround is simple, anyway):

katzer/cordova-plugin-local-notifications#426 (comment)

[ObjectiveTruth]

@csvan, that issue was just recently fixed via this PR 👍

davidpiegza/cordova-plugin-local-notifications#2

[baleboy]

After looking through the issues here and elsewhere, there seem to be two main problems that people have experienced which would prevent Crosswalk from being enabled by default:

• flickering/resizing/flashing screen when opening and closing virtual keyboard. For some people this is fixed by setting ANIMATABLE_XWALK_VIEW to true, but for some the only solution is to upgrade to Crosswalk 15
• not migrating local storage data when upgrading an existing app from platform webview to Crosswalk. This is also fixed in Crosswalk 15

The tricky thing is that the current release of cordova-plugin-crosswalk-webview in NPM (1.2.0) doesn't work with Crosswalk 15 because of some API changes. We are going to release an update next week, but meanwhile anybody who wants to try Crosswalk 15 in their current app needs to install the plugin from GitHub and configure the Crosswalk version (the plugin selects Crosswalk 14 by default):

cordova plugin add https://github.com/crosswalk-project/cordova-plugin-crosswalk-webview.git#master 

In config.xml:

<preference name="xwalkVersion" value="xwalk_core_library_beta:15+" />

It would be great if someone could test this combination and give us feedback. As far as I can tell, with these versions Crosswalk could be the default webview for Ionic on Android.

[baleboy]

A new version of the plugin that supports Crosswalk 15 is on NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/cordova-plugin-crosswalk-webview

[adamdbradley]

Let's go ahead a make crosswalk the default, and require an additional flag if it should not be used.

[tsurrel]

@wangyuzju
You can do like this to specify a version:
ionic browser add crosswalk@15.44.384.9