The Power of Crosswalk

Reduced Fragmentation

The immediate benefit of bundling an application with the Crosswalk webview is that everywhere your application runs, it uses the same, Chromium-based runtime. This reduces or eliminates many of the headaches encountered with older webviews. (The web app run below uses Web Components and WebGL.)

Ambitious web app without Crosswalk

Cutton-edge features may not work with the default Android webview on older devices.

Ambitious web app with Crosswalk

Web apps built with the Crosswalk webview can use the latest web innovations on any Android 4.0+ device.

WebCL: Accelerated Graphics

Building your web app with Crosswalk enables you to take advantage of new web app features and libraries. One example is WebCL which enables web apps to leverage the GPU to accelerate graphics processing. (The video below is a screen capture of an arm-based Nexus 7.)

Web app without WebCL

Web app with WebCL

SIMD: Parallel Execution

An advanced feature available on x86-based devices is SIMD: the ability to leverage the CPU to run data calculations in parallel. SIMD.js is a Javascript library that gives this ability to web apps.

The "Flocking Birds" web app to the right continually calculates the position and velocity of each bird. It tries to add as many birds as it can while maintaining ~30FPS.

About 17 birds can be generated without SIMD and about 32 birds with SIMD enabled.

(The video is a screen capture of an x86-based ZenPhone5.)

Web app without SIMD

Web app with SIMD