Office released support for WebView2 starting with Office version 0.20424. Windows 8.1 support window ends in January 2023. Note: Windows 8.0 is no longer supported. To learn more about WebView2, see Introduction to Edge WebView2. In addition, WebView2 is “evergreen”, meaning it is kept up-to-date with regular updates and security patches without relying on the operating system to be updated. WebView2 is the most modern web control available and is supported across Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. WebView2 is based on the open source Chromium project that popular browsers such as Google Chrome and the new Microsoft Edge use. Microsoft released the WebView2 browser control in October 2020. On Windows desktop, the future is WebView2 This is covered in Use the shared JavaScript runtime to improve the UI experience of your Office Add-in. Note: Office uses a JavaScript runtime for UI-less add-ins, such as custom functions in Excel and autorun add-ins in Outlook. In this post, we describe the latest changes in Office’s use of web runtimes as well as summarize the runtimes that we’ve used on various platforms in the past.

You’re curious to learn how we are making this simpler (at least on Windows).

You didn’t know that add-ins can run in eight different runtimes across various platforms.

You’ve ever wondered why Office Add-ins need to support Internet Explorer even though Microsoft does not.

For more information about which browser or control is used by the various platforms, see Browsers used by Office Add-ins.

Since Office is a cross-platform suite, it uses different browsers, or webview controls, to run add-ins depending on the platform on which it is running. A runtime can be encapsulated in a browser iFrame or an embeddable webview control on desktop clients. Think of a runtime as the execution environment for the add-in that’s a combination of a JavaScript engine and an HTML rendering control.

Office Add-ins require a runtime environment to execute.

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