Mobile/GeckoView: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 16:35, 26 April 2018

What is GeckoView

GeckoView is an Android library project that allows third-party developers to use Gecko as an Android View in their own applications. GeckoView is similar to Android's built in WebView, but it is not a drop in replacement for WebView.

Note that GeckoView is NOT ready to be used in a production environment. It is currently possible to load pages and do some basic stuff, but features are limited.

Current API documentation can be viewed here: https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/javadoc/mozilla-central/

Using GeckoView

Add Nightly taskcluster repo to your build.gradle

repositories {
    maven {
       url 'https://index.taskcluster.net/v1/task/gecko.v2.mozilla-central.nightly.latest.mobile.android-api-16-opt/artifacts/public/android/maven'
    }
}

Add geckoview to dependencies

Again, in build.gradle

dependencies {
    compile 'org.mozilla:geckoview-nightly-armeabi-v7a:+'
}

This will always use the latest Nightly in the repository. As GeckoView development continues, we will have Beta and Release repositories that have the expected version names (61.0.0, etc).

Loading a page in GeckoView

You can now use GeckoView your app by including the following in a layout XML file:

<org.mozilla.gecko.GeckoView
  android:id="@+id/geckoview"
  android:layout_width="fill_parent"
  android:layout_height="wrap_content" />

You can then load a page in your Activity with:

onCreate(...) {
    // Find the GeckoView in our layout
    GeckoView geckoView = (GeckoView) findViewById(R.id.geckoview);

    // Attach the GeckoView to a new GeckoSession
    GeckoSession session = new GeckoSession();
    geckoView.setSession(session);

    // Load a URL
    session.loadUri("http://mozilla.com");
}

Example App

Firefox Focus has a build variant that uses Gecko. To build, check out the Focus code from https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android and follow the instructions. The only difference is you need to select one of the Gecko build variants from the Android Studio 'Build' menu.

The Gecko-related code for Focus lives in WebViewProvider.java