Android webview slow

My android webviews are slow. This is on everything from phones to 3.0+ tablets with more than adequate specs

I know that webviews are supposed to be "limited" but I see web apps done with phone gap that must be using all sorts of CSS3 and JQuery sorcery, they run just fine and speedy

so I'm missing something, is there some kind of myWebview.SPEEDHACK(1) that I can use to speed things up?

also, sometimes the contents of my webview just simply don't load, instead of slowly loading, it just wont load. The asset I am testing with is stored locally, no errors.

Solution 1:

It depends on the web application being loaded. Try some of the approaches below:

Set higher render priority (deprecated from API 18+):

webview.getSettings().setRenderPriority(RenderPriority.HIGH);

Enable/disable hardware acceleration:

if (Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= Build.VERSION_CODES.KITKAT) {
    // chromium, enable hardware acceleration
    webView.setLayerType(View.LAYER_TYPE_HARDWARE, null);
} else {
    // older android version, disable hardware acceleration
    webView.setLayerType(View.LAYER_TYPE_SOFTWARE, null);
}

Disable the cache (if you have problems with your content):

webview.getSettings().setCacheMode(WebSettings.LOAD_NO_CACHE);

Solution 2:

Adding this android:hardwareAccelerated="true" in the manifest was the only thing that significantly improved the performance for me

More info here: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/application-element.html#hwaccel

Solution 3:

The solution for us was the opposite. We disabled hardware acceleration on the WebView only (rather than on the entire app in the manifest) by using this code:

if (Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= 11){
    webview.setLayerType(View.LAYER_TYPE_SOFTWARE, null);
}

CSS3 animations are smoother now. We are using Android 4.0.

More info here: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=17352

Solution 4:

I think the following works best:

if (Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= Build.VERSION_CODES.KITKAT) {
    webView.setLayerType(View.LAYER_TYPE_HARDWARE, null);
} else {
    webView.setLayerType(View.LAYER_TYPE_SOFTWARE, null);
}

Android 19 has Chromium engine for WebView. I guess it works better with hardware acceleration.

Solution 5:

I tried all the proposals to fix the render performance problem in my phonegap app. But nothing realy worked.

Finally, after a whole day of searching, I made it. I set within the tag (not the tag) of my AndroidManifest

<application android:hardwareAccelerated="false" ...

Now the app behaves in the same fast way as my webbrowser. Seems like, if hardware acceleration is not always the best feature...

The detailed problem I had: https://stackoverflow.com/a/24467920/3595386