Bad practice ? More than one WebView to implement a multiple tabs browser

Issue

I've been developing a simple customized browser using Android WebView for a period of time. Recently I'm facing a choice to make the browser support multiple tabs. The first option is to instantiate one more Android WebView, and the second option is to break what I've built using the WebView and fork Open-sourced Chromium project then transfer it into my customized browser from scratch.

However, the second approach isn't easy. So my main question is, is instantiating multiple WebViews for multiple tabs a quite bad practice? Does this approach eat much more memory usage than what we expect?

Solution

Finally, I extended my customized browser with multiple WebViews support which restricts users to create limited tabs. I also find the WebView is lightweight enough. The memory increases roughly 4 MB in average per new WebView loading an URL. Also, the YouTube can't be played simultaneously with multiple tabs. The last played YouTube will pause the previous one.

Answered By - Jeff T.