What to consider when embedding the WebView2 installer

[ackh]

I have a .NET application that internally uses the WebView2 with disabled Smartscreen to show some specific web content. Technically, everything works as expected but it is unclear to me what needs to be considered when we deploy this application.

What we strive for is to have a single executable that first runs the WebView2 installation package followed by the installation package of our own application. Technically, this is straight forward to do but I'm unsure what the legal implications of this approach are.

Now, the documentation advises multiple times on how to package the WebView2 installation package into the installer of the application that relies on the WebView2:

A quote from the section Deploying the Evergreen WebView2 Runtime :

Or, download the bootstrapper and package it with your WebView2 app.

A quote from the section Offline deployment :

Include the Evergreen Standalone Installer in your app installer or updater.

The document even gives advice on how to install the WebView2 unattended, i.e. without any user interaction and specifies the command for the Evergreen Bootstrapper as follows:

MicrosoftEdgeWebview2Setup.exe /silent /install

For the Evergreen Standalone Installer, it specifies the unattended command as follows:

MicrosoftEdgeWebView2RuntimeInstaller{X64/X86/ARM64}.exe /silent /install

So, the documentation seems to encourage that the WebView2 installation package gets embedded into the application installer itself and even seems to encourage installing it silently. But that would mean that no licensing agreement is shown to the end user. Even installing it by showing the full user interface does not show any license agreement because the WebView2 installation package simply doesn't show one.

The only place where a license agreement is shown is when I download the WebView2 installer. But our end users never need to do this because we automatically install the WebView2 silently as a prerequisite of our application. So, this leads to three questions:

1. Is the WebView2 installation package supposed to be packaged into our own installer then installed silently by that installer?
2. In case that the answer for question 1 is yes, do we need to display a dialog where end users have to accept the licensing agreements associated with the WebView2?
3. In case that the answer for question 2 is yes, what licensing agreements do we have to show? There are two options: Option 1 from here and option 2 from here.