How to set the initial zoom/width for a webview

Question

I am trying to get the WebView to have similar behavior as the android browser. The browser opens all pages in a way that tries to fit their width to the screen. However, the default behavior of the WebView is to start at a 100% pixel scale so it starts zoomed in on the top left corner.

I have spent the last couple hours trying to find a way to get the WebView to scale the page to the screen like it does in the browser but I'm not having any luck. Has anyone found a way to accomplish this?

I see is a setting called setLoadWithOverviewMode, but that didn't appear to do anything at all. I also experimented with setInitialScale but on different screen sizes and web page sizes that won't be as graceful as the browsers scaling.

Any one have any leads?

Thanks

EDIT: Brian's method seems to work when the phone in landscape but not in portrait. In portrait it is close but still does not fit the whole screen in the page. I starting this bounty with the hope there is a sure-fire way to get the initial zoom to fit the page to the width of the page in any orientation or screen size.

for some reason i spent a whole day around this and it worked only in api7 and not above. Finally had to implement the same using setInitialScale and calculating the initial scale manually. By the way i had a single image with 480x800 dimensions. — Samuel
Working for me on every device I have tried it on, from api level 7 up through 14. — cottonBallPaws

Brian Brian · Accepted Answer · 2010-12-01T07:44:36

The following code loads the desktop version of the Google homepage fully zoomed out to fit within the webview for me in Android 2.2 on an 854x480 pixel screen. When I reorient the device and it reloads in portrait or landscape, the page width fits entirely within the view each time.

BrowserLayout.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:orientation="vertical"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="fill_parent">

     <WebView android:id="@+id/webview"
         android:layout_width="fill_parent"
         android:layout_height="fill_parent" />
</LinearLayout>

Browser.java:

import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.webkit.WebView;

public class Browser extends Activity {

    /** Called when the activity is first created. */
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.BrowserLayout);

        String loadUrl = "http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&output=html";

        // initialize the browser object
        WebView browser = (WebView) findViewById(R.id.webview);

        browser.getSettings().setLoadWithOverviewMode(true);
        browser.getSettings().setUseWideViewPort(true);

        try {
            // load the url
            browser.loadUrl(loadUrl);
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

How to set the initial zoom/width for a webview

9 Answers