Android 10 stops using Google Chrome to render web pages

Google Chome has been a major part of your Android user experience. The app is not only a browser that comes pre-installed on most of the smartphones, but it is much more than that. Android uses something called WebView for rendering web pages inside applications. WebView was introduced back with Android Lollipop and with Android Nougat, the company made it separate from Chrome. Now, with Android 10, the comapny is again planning to make changes to these apps.

According to a Google engineer, Android 10 has something called as Trichrome. The engineer wrote, "Chrome is no longer used as a WebView implementation in Q+. We’ve moved to a new model for sharing common code between Chrome and WebView (called “Trichrome”) which gives the same benefits of reduced download and install size while having fewer weird special cases and bugs."

The Google engineer came forward with all these explanations after an Android 10 user raised a complaint stating that is is not able to find the Chrome option in the WebView picker anymore. This is usually found inside Developer Options.

Also Read: Google announces Android 10 (Go Edition) for entry level smartphones

While this might mean big news for the developers, the normal users just need to know that the Google Chrome browser will not act as a Web View interface anymore. However, the new WebView will be based on the Chromium project.

Chromium project page states, “Like with Monochrome, users can find each of these four channels of WebView on the Play Store and install them simultaneously on a single device. Also like Monochrome, users can use the “WebView implementation” menu to choose which installed WebView the system should use.”