UniWebView

Supporting New Window

Choose Safe Browser Mode

This guide is for the general-purpose web view.

To get full support for a new window or new tab, we suggest you choose to use the Safe Browsing Mode, which gives a browser level experience.

In a general web browser (like Chrome or Safari), a URL with target="_blank" attribute is intended to be opened in a new tab. However, in the context of web view, there is no way to handle new tabs without proper configurations. Due to that, by default UniWebView will ignore the target="_blank" and try to open the page in the same web view if that kind of link is pressed.

This works for most cases, but if this is a problem to your app logic, and you need to handle the new tab, you can change this behavior by calling SetSupportMultipleWindows with true:

webView.SetSupportMultipleWindows(true, false);

It enables the "opening in new tab" behavior in a limited way, by adding the new tab web view above to the current web view, with the same size and position. When the opened new tab is closed, it will be removed from the view hierarchy automatically.

The new tab web view is just a temporary layer: it is not a fully functional UniWebView component itself, and will not follow all settings as the original web view. You have to make sure it can be dismissed correctly, for example, using a JavaScript to call window.close(). Otherwise, the original web view will be always covered and invisible.

Opening window with JavaScript

Besides of a link with "_blank" attribute, there is another way to open a new window: JavaScript. An invocation of window.open will ask the web view to open a new window. To support it, make sure you pass true as the second parameter (allowJavaScriptOpening) to the SetSupportMultipleWindows method. On some devices, you also need to call SetAllowJavaScriptOpenWindow before creating the web view to allow UniWebView can receive the opening request:

UniWebView.SetAllowJavaScriptOpenWindow(true);
var webView = // Creating the web view component...

webView.SetSupportMultipleWindows(true, true);

// Then, you can use JavaScript like `window.open` to open the web view.

The code above allows any JavaScript to open a new window, even without user's action. It might be an issue in some cases, especially if you are using an iframe to display an external page, or some un-controlled third-party JavaScript code is contained in your page. Use it at your own risk.

For more about this topic, please check the API reference of SetSupportMultipleWindows.