Android Webview Enters Unrecoverable State If Executed Javascript Enters Infinite Loop

The Android WebView widget appears to enter an unrecoverable state if executed JavaScript code is caught in an infinite loop. For example, this webpage will cause the problem: <

Solution 1:

I don't think you can do too much about that. Because the WebView is single process (this is true for the 4.4 WebView too) and the renderers are running in your app's process a misbehaving web page can lead to your process being OOM killed by allocating tons of memory.

Chrome doesn't suffer from this problem since it runs the renderer in a separate process which can be killed. The WebView could be modified to kill the thread that JavaScript execution is taking place in, however that would lead to memory leaks (since the OS will not clean up for you like it does in the case of a separate process) and like I said above - doing so doesn't really protect you against a malicious web page allocating memory.

I think your solution of displaying a "the page is not responding. kill the app?" popup to the user is the best you can do using the WebView. The alternative is to create your own multi-process browser based on the Chromium code but that will probably take a lot more effort.