Right way to dispose page with WebView in a MAUI app

Question

I have a MAUI Android app (sample) with 2 pages, 1 home page and 1 page containing WebView. From home page user can go to the WebView page and open a site, come back to the home page and again go to WebView page to open other site, user can do this multiple times.

After few such cycles, in edge://inspect/#devices I see multiple instances of the WebView and with page navigating away the WebView is not going away, I am concerned that this is causing memory leak.

I see the WebView class does not have any close/dispose/destroy kind of methods. What is the proper way to close the page containing WebView so that all resources are properly released?

I have attached the sample app which reproduces the issue. Pasting some code snippets for quick reference -

MauiAppWebView.zip

// How page with WebView is being opened
private async void OnCounterClicked(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    List<string> siteList = new List<string>() { "https://www.google.com", "https://www.bing.com", "https://www.youtube.com", "https://www.microsoft.com" };
    Random rnd = new Random();
    await Navigation.PushAsync(new NewPage1(siteList[rnd.Next(0, siteList.Count)]));
}

// How site is being loaded in WebView
public NewPage1(string site)
{
    InitializeComponent();
    webview.Source = site;
}
// Page exit/back handling
private void GoBack(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    Navigation.PopAsync();
}

Steps to Reproduce -

1. Build and start the app attached in the zip on Android device.
2. Click on 'Click me'
3. New page with site loads, click 'Go Back'
4. Repeat step 2 and 3 few times.
5. Open edge://inspect/#devices
6. Look for the device, you'll see all instances of WebView

Things I have tried so far -

1. While existing/back the page, set webview to null.
2. Used singleton instance of WebView in the page.

None of these things helped, and in edge inspect I still see all the previous webview pages.

Please suggest on what is the right way to dispose the page and webview.

Answer 1

Hello,

In MAUI, you can implement this requirement using the following code.

protected override void OnDisappearing()
{
    base.OnDisappearing();
    if (null != webview)
    {
        webview = null;
    }
}

Best Regards,

Alec Liu.

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