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Web Embeds | If you want to embed (third-party) web content in an Electron BrowserWindow, there are three options available to you: <iframe> tags, <webview> tags, and WebContentsView. Each one offers slightly different functionality and is useful in different situations. To help you choose between these, this guide explains the differences and capabilities of each option. | web-embeds | false |
Web Embeds
Overview
If you want to embed (third-party) web content in an Electron BrowserWindow
,
there are three options available to you: <iframe>
tags, <webview>
tags,
and WebContentsView
. Each one offers slightly different functionality and is
useful in different situations. To help you choose between these, this guide
explains the differences and capabilities of each option.
Iframes
Iframes in Electron behave like iframes in regular browsers. An <iframe>
element in your page can show external web pages, provided that their
Content Security Policy
allows it. To limit the number of capabilities of a site in an <iframe>
tag,
it is recommended to use the sandbox
attribute
and only allow the capabilities you want to support.
WebViews
Important Note: we do not recommend you to use WebViews, as this tag undergoes dramatic architectural changes that may affect stability of your application. Consider switching to alternatives, like
iframe
and Electron'sWebContentsView
, or an architecture that avoids embedded content by design.
WebViews are based on Chromium's WebViews and are not
explicitly supported by Electron. We do not guarantee that the WebView API will
remain available in future versions of Electron. To use <webview>
tags, you
will need to set webviewTag
to true
in the webPreferences
of your
BrowserWindow
.
WebView is a custom element (<webview>
) that will only work inside Electron.
They are implemented as an "out-of-process iframe". This means that all
communication with the <webview>
is done asynchronously using IPC. The
<webview>
element has many custom methods and events, similar to
webContents
, that provide you with greater control over the content.
Compared to an <iframe>
, <webview>
tends to be slightly slower but offers
much greater control in loading and communicating with the third-party content
and handling various events.
WebContentsView
WebContentsView
s are not a part of the
DOM—instead, they are created, controlled, positioned, and sized by your
Main process. Using WebContentsView
, you can combine and layer many pages
together in the same BaseWindow
.
WebContentsView
s offer the greatest control over their contents, since they
implement the webContents
similarly to how BrowserWindow
does it. However,
as WebContentsView
s are not elements inside the DOM, positioning them
accurately with respect to DOM content requires coordination between the
Main and Renderer processes.