Greetings, traveler!

For years, displaying web content in SwiftUI meant falling back to WKWebView from UIKit. It worked, but it always felt like a workaround.

Starting with iOS 18.4, Apple added a native WebView for SwiftUI. No more UIViewRepresentable, no more bridging. Just import WebKit and SwiftUI, and you are good to go.

How It Works

Here’s the exact line from the docs:

“A view that displays some web content. Connect a WebView with a WebPage to fully control the browsing experience, including essential functionality such as loading a URL.”

So you can finally load web content the same way you’d work with other SwiftUI views. It’s all reactive and state-driven.

Modifiers

A few modifiers give more control over how the WebView behaves.

• webViewLinkPreviews(_:): Turn link previews on or off.
• webViewContentBackground(_:): Show or hide the web page’s native background.
• webViewMagnificationGestures(_:): Enable pinch-to-zoom.
• webViewBackForwardNavigationGestures(_:): Allow swipe-based back/forward navigation.
• webViewScrollPosition(_:): Bind the scroll offset to a ScrollPosition.

Two Ways to Use It

There are two initializers.

The simple one takes a URL directly. Here’s what that looks like:

import SwiftUI
import WebKit

struct WebViewDemo: View {
		private let url = URL(string: "https://developer.apple.com/wwdc25/")!
		
    var body: some View {
        WebView(url: url)
    }
}

If you need more control—like injecting custom requests, observing page state, or updating content—you can use the WebPage approach:

import SwiftUI
import WebKit

struct WebPageDemo: View {
    @State private var page = WebPage()
    private let url = URL(string: "https://developer.apple.com/wwdc25/")!
    
    var body: some View {
        WebView(page)
            .onAppear {
                page.load(URLRequest(url: url))
            }
    }
}

This gives you more room for state management.

One Thing to Keep in Mind

The new WebView is only available from iOS 18.4 and later. If you support earlier versions, you’ll still need a fallback with WKWebView.

Conclusion

This is a small addition, but a useful one. You no longer have to write a wrapper just to show a webpage. It’s a clean, native API, and it fits into SwiftUI the way you’d expect.