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Anybody has a feeling how much effort it would be to replace the webkit engine with firefox in Android for webview rendering? I am quite unhappy with the webkit engine on some features.
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Mozilla uses GeckoView to power Firefox for Android, Firefox Reality, Firefox Focus, and other Android apps. GeckoView serves a similar purpose to Android's built-in WebView, but it has its own APIs and is not a drop in replacement.
Since Android 4.4 (KitKat), the WebView component is based on the Chromium open source project. WebViews now include an updated version of the V8 JavaScript engine and support for modern web standards previously missing in old WebViews.
But a wide variety of other Android applications also use it to display web content that isn't a part of the app. The WebView app is based on Chromium, the same open source project that powers the Google Chrome web browser, but it doesn't include all the features present in the full version of Chrome.
Web View is slower on both as compared to native android browser.
Mozilla started working on GeckoView, which does exactly what you need. This blog post points to some sample code.
Here is the master bug, in case you want to follow progress: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=geckoview
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Non-trivially difficult. Depending on how much consistency you need between your new WebView implementation and the existing implementation you could have a lot of work to do. There is an existing Firefox browser on Android so you could start with that (which would hopefully save you a lot of time) but at the very least you would need to check that the Firefox libraries exist and are accessible, you would probably need to bundle them with your app to get them to work (which would massively increase the size of your app) and then hooking up all the WebView apis would involve a lot of work.
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