Tiny browser features: JSBrowser crash resistance - Dave's Blog

JSBrowser is a basic browser built as a Win10 JavaScript UWP app around the WebView HTML element. Its fun and relatively simple to implement tiny browser features in JavaScript and in this post I'm implementing crash resistance.

The normal DOM mechanisms for creating an HTML WebView create an in-process WebView, in which the WebView runs on a unique UI thread. But we can use the MSWebView constructor instead to create an out-of-process WebView in which the WebView runs in its own distinct WebView process. Unlike an in-process WebView, Web content running in an out-of-process WebView can only crash the WebView process and not the app process.

        this.replaceWebView = () => {
            let webview = document.querySelector("#WebView");
            // Cannot access webview.src - anything that would need to communicate with the webview process may fail
            let oldSrc = browser.currentUrl;
            const webviewParent = webview.parentElement;
            webviewParent.removeChild(webview);
            webview = new MSWebView();
            Object.assign(this, {
                "webview": webview
            });
            webview.setAttribute("id", "WebView");

            // During startup our currentUrl field is blank. If the WebView has crashed 
            // and we were on a URI then we may obtain it from this property.
            if (browser.currentUrl && browser.currentUrl != "") {
                this.trigger("newWebview");
                this.navigateTo(browser.currentUrl);
            }
            webviewParent.appendChild(webview);

I run replaceWebView during startup to replace the in-process WebView created via HTML markup with an out-of-process WebView. I could be doing more to dynamically copy styles, attributes, etc but I know what I need to set on the WebView and just do that.

When a WebView process crashes the corresponding WebView object is no longer useful and a new WebView element must be created. In fact if the old WebView object is used it may throw and will no longer have valid state. Accordingly when the WebView crashes I run replaceWebView again. Additionally, I need to store the last URI we've navigated to (browser.currentUrl in the above) since the crashed WebView object won't know what URI it is on after it crashes.

            webview.addEventListener("MSWebViewProcessExited", () => { 
                if (browser.currentUrl === browser.lastCrashUrl) {                   ++browser.lastCrashUrlCrashCount; 
                } 
                else { 
                    browser.lastCrashUrl = browser.currentUrl; 
                    browser.lastCrashUrlCrashCount = 1; 
                } 
                // If we crash again and again on the same URI, maybe stop trying to load that URI. 
                if (browser.lastCrashUrlCrashCount >= 3) { 
                    browser.lastCrashUrl = ""; 
                    browser.lastCrashUrlCrashCount = 0; 
                    browser.currentUrl = browser.startPage; 
                } 
                this.replaceWebView(); 
            }); 

I also keep track of the last URI that we recovered and how many times we've recovered that same URI. If the same URI crashes more than 3 times in a row then I assume that it will keep happening and I navigate to the start URI instead.