nfswebview

nfswebview is a high-performance, hardware-accelerated, GPU-to-GPU Android WebView rendering layer specifically engineered for the Kivy framework. By bypassing standard off-screen bitmap blitting, it directly hooks the Android hardware compositor into Kivy’s OpenGL ES context via a specialized GL_TEXTURE_EXTERNAL_OES pipeline.

This library delivers native 60 FPS scrolling, full support for hardware-accelerated WebRTC (video/audio streams), HTML5 Geolocation, advanced input handling (touch event mapping), and complete compatibility up to Android 16 (API 36).

[!INFO] NfsBrowser is a full fledged open source browser application build using NfsWebview.

Architecture & Pipeline Overview

Standard off-screen rendering techniques capture web contents via pixel arrays, causing massive CPU bottlenecks. nfswebview eliminates this overhead through direct GPU memory mapping:

• OpenGL OES Binding: The Python wrapper initializes an external OpenGL texture pointer (GL_TEXTURE_EXTERNAL_OES) via Kivy's graphics engine.
• Surface Association: This texture ID is passed through Pyjnius to instantiate a native Android SurfaceTexture and underlying hardware Surface.
• Offscreen Composite Routing: The native Java controller (NfsWebview) forces the WebView's hardware canvas to draw explicitly to our target Surface.
• Custom Shading: A specialized GLSL fragment shader samples the external OES surface texture directly into Kivy’s drawing canvas canvas matrix.
• Bidirectional Input Bridges: Touch vectors are captured inside Kivy, translated to native Android scales, and injected directly into the WebView's event dispatch loop.
• Direct Keyboard Mapping: Mapped to use android system keyboard directly on textinput focus.

Installation

Add nfswebview as a dependency in following ways with different toolchains.

If using the ksproject toolchain

uv add git+https://github.com/Novfensec/nfswbview@master

Since the project explicitly uses ksp-builder backend, all java files will be placed in a .java folder under site-packages and then parsed by ksproject in the resulting AGP for compilation.

If using python-for-android toolchain + buildozer build system

• Copy the java folder as it is aside the buildozer.spec.
• Edit the buildozer.spec to have the dependency and include the java files.

requirements = python3, kivy, ...other..., nfswebview # or https://github.com/Novfensec/nfswebview/archive/master.zip
android.add_src = ./java

Quick Start & Usage

Import the NfsWebviewWidget directly into your layout hierarchy just like any standard Kivy component.

from kivy.app import App
from kivy.uix.boxlayout import BoxLayout
from nfswebview import NfsWebviewWidget

class WebBrowserApp(App):
    def build(self):
        layout = BoxLayout(orientation='vertical')

        self.webview = NfsWebviewWidget(url="https://github.com")
        layout.add_widget(self.webview)

        return layout

if __name__ == '__main__':
    WebBrowserApp().run()

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.