You can launch a URL in SURF with 

surf://http://YOURURL

or in Chrome with:

Intent://YOURURL#Intent;scheme=http;action=android.intent.action.VIEW;component=com.android.chrome;end

or

Intent://YOURURL#Intent;scheme=https;package=com.android.chrome;end

More info:

https://discussions.soti.net/thread/lockdown-launch-an-url-with-chrome/

Unless you have blacklisted Chrome or changed the default WebView implementation, a GMS Android 8.1 Zebra MC93 almost certainly is using Chrome as its WebView implementation.

This means that any app that is leveraging a WebView is effectively powered by Chrome. The SOTI HTML Lockdown itself is even rendered within a Chrome WebView.

While it is the Chrome WebView engine that is rendering your content, there are various parameters that an application can choose to set when launching a WebView so just because it is Chrome, doesn't mean that it will behave exactly like Chrome. You can for instance launch a WebView that has Javascript disabled and that will produce a much different behavior when accessing the same website in Chrome.

In this instance, my theory is that what you're seeing from a Chrome behavior is some form of website caching going on that is making the browser experience seem snappier and more responsive to you. When a website is launched within a WebView it is almost like launching into an Incognito tab in Chrome itself. Nothing is usually cached or stored in between launches as the WebView is destroyed and recreated each time. 

Given this architecture I'm not sure if you are ever going to feel like the WebView browser launch is fast enough relative to Chrome. You may be better off launching directly to Chrome from the lockdown instead of using the WebView and then you can use AppConfig to control the look and feel of Chrome in order to lock it down somewhat. Alternatively you can try SOTI Surf, the free industrial browser from SOTI that has built in configuration parameters via Profile in the MobiControl console.

hello,

you bring up some excellent information

I tried to find on our device the webview implementation but could not, is that under "settings"?

I would really like to know what our device is set to?

I have installed soti surf to see if that would be any faster but noticed that it changed our soti agent

from remote control to remote view

I know we had that problem when installing the soti agent, depending on how we installed it would

go into remote view, after a soti tech helped me we ended up installing soti agent during the initial

setup device stage in which we put in the code afw#mobicontrol at the google sign in

how would I go about this?  add something to our url? to make sure it launches in "chrome"

You may be better off launching directly to Chrome from the lockdown instead of using the WebView

when i tried both of these links it said, activity not found

there must be something else I need to do

i ended up taking surf off to try to use chrome but not sure if i need to do something else in lockdown

i finally got it to work by trying this

intent:<my url>#Intent;action=android.intent.action.VIEW;end