Starting with Windows 11, the WebView2 Runtime is included as part of the operating system. For Windows 10, we have recommended developers to distribute and install the runtime with their applications. In the past two years, more than 400 million of these devices now have the WebView2 runtime thanks to developers building and distributing WebView2 applications.
Redistributable runtime deployment allows developers to use WebView2 on devices that didn’t yet have the runtime, but comes with increased development cost and has been a pain point for WebView2 developers. Once we complete the WebView2 Runtime rollout started today, developers can more reliably depend on the presence of WebView2 on Windows 10 or later consumer devices, in addition to all Windows 11 devices, making WebView2 app deployment much more straightforward.
Windows 10 surely isn’t left behind any time soon – good news for those on the fence.
So what is happening with WebView 1 (EdgeHTML)? Will it still get updates until the last version of Windows 10 stops being supported?
EdgeHTML is dead, it has not been updated for more than two years, and the newer edge versions does not support it at all. (since the move to blink engine). It is only still supported for not-yet updated UWP apps. And most apps on the microsoft store is win32, including almost all non-trivial games.
UWP seems like a huge flop outside microsoft’s own products, but that might just be my perspective from looking in from the outside.
I’m not on the fence, I’m refusing to ever upgrade to Win 11+ unless MS makes some serious changes to basically requiring a MS Account synced when setting up the OS. The Win 10 pushiness for logging in with an MS account is annoying, but not _too_ terrible to skip. Win 11, especially for those of us who’d pay the premium for “Pro” it’s inexcusable.
Nope, I’ll be done with Windows, by and large (except for a VM if I truly need or for games) in the near future. My next major hardware upgrade I’m going to try out running Linux + Proton full time on my desktop, to match my laptop which runs Linux as the primary OS, and I have a Win 10 VM for when I need. Even though I haven’t really needed it much at all.
Plus… Win 10 was supposed to be the “forever” Windows, right? Whatever happened to that? Ugh.