Last time I dug around into this, there was a delegate that's called that allows the app to open a new window/tab as makes sense for the app and display the link. I've seen applications that respond to this delegate by just forcing the existing WebView to open the link. If you don't implement the delegate, as I recall, nothing happens with these sort of links, they just appear dead to the user.
Yes this is basic (and incredibly common) behavior. The alternative is often much worse (an embedded WebView in each app to do things like open TOS pages).
You do have Webviews but it's stil in an alpha state right now, they have poor keyboard support, no multiple tab support and are not available on anything else than Android & iOS.
I wouldn't say WKWebView is 'the old way', it isn't marked as deprecated and just because there's a new class that's easier to use doesn't mean they replace older classes that let you do more stuff. As you've found out, you've run into problems, but I have no idea why you would think not to use WKWebView if you can't do what you need.
That said, in general, never, ever use in app browsers for surfing the web. We use them for specific pages on our website that should interact back to the app, otherwise we tell the system to open the URL in the user's browser
Yes, I had webview in mind when I was writing that comment. But obviously WebViews aren't good enough. We're talking about enough functionality to own a multi-window app.
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