Igalia WebKit Team

WebKit Igalia Periodical #59

2026-03-09T20:02:33+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from March 2 to March 9.</p>
As part of this week's handful of news, WebKitGTK and WPE WebKit now have support for Gamepad's "VibationActuator" property, the video decoding limit is now configurable at runtime in addition to build time, and an interesting fix that makes WebKit render fonts like other browsers by making it blend text incorrectly (!). </p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>

Using `libmanette</code>'s rumble</em> support, enabled Gamepad VibrationActuator</em></a> for WebKitGTK</a> and WPE WebKit</a>.</p>`
`With these changes, playEffect()</a> can be used to play dual-rumble</em> vibration effects.</p> </div>`
Multimedia 🎥</h3> GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p> </div> VIDEO_DECODING_LIMIT</code> is now configurable at runtime</a>, in addition to build time. That will allow vendors that share a single binary build on different platforms to fine-tune their needs without a rebuild.</p> </div> Graphics 🖼️</h3> Landed a change</a> that tweaks the text rendering done with Skia. With this change, the text looks more natural now - just like in other browsers. However, this is done by blending text incorrectly as a compromise.</p> </div> Releases 📦️</h2> One more set of release candidates for the upcoming stable branch, WebKitGTK 2.51.93</a> and WPE WebKit 2.51.93</a>, have been published. For those interested in previewing the upcoming 2.52.x series this release is expected to be quite stable. Reporting issues in Bugzilla</a> are, as usual, more than welcome.</p> </div> That’s all for this week!</p> </div>



WebKit Igalia Periodical #58
2026-03-02T20:11:00+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from February 23 to March 2.</p>

This installment of the periodical brings news about support
for Qualcomm qtivdec2 and qtivenc2 on GStreamer, GPU texture
atlas creation and replay substitution, enhancement of the scroll
gesture in WPE, and two new releases: WebKitGTK 2.51.92 and WPE
WebKit 2.51.92.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
Work on adding support for the Qualcomm GStreamer qtivdec2 and qtivenc2 elements is on-going</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
Implemented GPU texture atlas creation and replay substitution</a> in the Skia painting engine on GTK/WPE. After recording, raster images are packed into GPU atlases via BitmapTexture</code>, with two upload paths: an optimized DMA-buf path that memory-maps GPU buffers and dispatches uploading to a dedicated worker thread, and a synchronous GL fallback using BitmapTexture::updateContents()</code>. Atlas uploads are synchronized across workers using a countdown-latch fence. During replay, SkiaReplayCanvas</code> intercepts raster image draws and substitutes them with atlas texture draws, mapping source coordinates into atlas space.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
WPE Platform API 🧩</h3>

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p>
</div>
  
The recent WPE WebKit 2.51.92 release is the first one to have its WPEPlatform documentation online</a>, but it was not included in the tarball. This issue has been corrected</a> and tarballs for future releases  will also include this documentation.</p>
  </div>
  

Scrolling using touch input with WPEPlatform would result in scrolling faster when more than one touch point was in effect. The gesture detector has been fixed</a> to make scrolling have always a consistent speed.</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
The third —and likely the last— release candidates for the upcoming stable branch, WebKitGTK 2.51.92</a> and WPE WebKit 2.51.92</a>, have been published. For those interested in previewing the upcoming 2.52.x series this release is expected to be quite stable; but there might be still some rough edges. Reporting issues in Bugzilla</a> are, as usual, more than welcome.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #57
2026-02-23T19:52:49+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from February 9 to February 23.</p>

In this week we have a nice fix for video streams timestamps, a fix
for a PDF rendering regression, support for rendering video buffers
provided by Qualcomm video decoders, and a fix for a font selection
issue. Also notable we had a new WPE Android release, and the libsoup
3.6.6 release.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
Added a new webkit_feature_list_find()</code> convenience function</a> to the public API, which searches for a WebKitFeature</a> given its identifier.</p>
  </div>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
Opportunistically fix decoding timestamps to prevent deletion of preexisting samples when PTS doesn't conflict</a>, fixing potential glitches when inserting videos (eg: ad insertion).</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
Fixed</a> a PDF rendering regression</a> caused by the canvas 2D operation recording feature, where switching between the recording canvas and the GPU surface canvas failed to preserve the full save/restore nesting, clip stack, and transparency layer state. Replaced the fragile state-copying approach with a state replay mechanism in GraphicsContextSkia that tracks the full sequence of save restore, clip, and transparency layer operations, then reconstructs the exact nesting on the target canvas when flushing a recording.</p>
  </div>
  

Added support</a> for rendering video buffers provided by Qualcomm hardware-accelerated decoders, with aid from the EXT_YUV_target</a> OpenGL extension.</p>
  </div>
  

Fixed</a> the font selection issue that the system fallback font cache mixed up different font styles.</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
WPE Android 0.3.2</a> has been released, and prebuilt packages are available at the Maven Central repository</a>. This is a stable maintenance release which updates WPE WebKit to 2.50.5, which is the most recent stable release.</p>
  </div>
  

libsoup 3.6.6</a> has been released with numerous bug and security fixes.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #56
2026-02-09T23:21:30+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from February 2 to February 9.</p>

The main event this week was FOSDEM (pun intended), which included
presentations related to WebKit; but also we got a batch of stable
and development releases, asynchronous scrolling work, OpenGL
logging, cleanups, and improving the inspector for the WPE work.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
While asynchronous scrolling for mouse wheel events was already supported,
scrollbar layers were still being painted on the main thread. This has been
changed</a> to paint scrollbars on the
scrolling thread instead, which avoids scrollbars to “lag” behind scrolled
content.</p>
  </div>
  

Fixed</a> flickering caused by the
combination of damage tracking and asynchronous scrolling for mouse wheel
events.</p>
  </div>
  

It is now possible to enable debug logging for OpenGL
contexts</a> using the new GLContext</code> log
channel, which takes advantage of the message events produced by the
widespread KHR_debug
extension</a>.</p>
Figuring out the exact location inside WebKit that triggered an OpenGL issue
may still be challenging with this aid, and therefore a backtrace will be
appended</a> in case of errors to help
pinpoint the source, when the log channel is enabled at the “debug” level with
GLContext=debug</code>.</p>
  </div>
  

Configuring the build with USE_SKIA=OFF</code> to make WebKit use the
Cairo</a> graphics library is no longer
supported</a>. Using
Skia</a> has been the default since  late
2024</a>,
and after two full years the 2.54.0 release (due in September 2026)
will be the first one where the choice is no longer possible.</p>
  </div>
WebKitGTK 🖥️</h2>
  
The “on demand” hardware acceleration policy has been rarely used lately, and
thus support for it has been removed</a>.
Note that this affects only the GTK port when built with GTK 3—the option never
existed when using GTK 4.</p>
Existing GTK 3 applications that use
WEBKIT_HARDWARE_ACCELERATION_POLICY_ON_DEMAND</code> will continue to work and do
not</strong> need rebuilding: they will be promoted to use the “always enabled” policy
starting with WebKitGTK 2.54.0 (due in September 2026).</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
  
The Web Inspector has received
support</a> for saving data to local
files, allowing things such as saving page resources or exporting the network
session to a HAR archive</a>.</p>
Note that using the Web Inspector locally is supported when using the
WPEPlatform API, and the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+I</kbd> may be used to bring it up.</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
WebKitGTK
2.50.5</a> and
WPE WebKit 2.50.5</a> have
been released. These are stable maintenance releases that improves stability,
correct bugs, and fixes small rendering issues.</p>
The second release candidates for the upcoming stable branch, WebKitGTK
2.51.91</a> and
WPE WebKit 2.51.91</a>,
have been published as well. Those using those to preview the upcoming 2.52.x
series are encouraged to provide bug reports in
Bugzilla</a> for any issue they may experience.</p>
  </div>
Community & Events 🤝</h2>
  
We have published a blog
post</a>
on our work implementing the
Temporal</a> proposal in JavaScriptCore,
WebKit's JavaScript engine.</p>
  </div>
  

This year's edition of FOSDEM</a> took place in
Brussels between January 31st and February 1st, and featured a number of
sessions related to WebKitGTK and WPE:</p>

The Web Platform on Linux devices with WebKit: where are we
now?</a>,
by Mario Sánchez, is a good introduction-level talk about the GTK and WPE
WebKit ports.</li>
WebRTC support in WebKitGTK and WPEWebKit with GStreamer: Current status and
plans</a>
by Philippe Normand. Exactly what it says on the tin.</li>
Interop and MathML
Core</a> by Eri
Pazos, about the ongoing effort to improve how different Web engines handle
MathML—including WebKit!</li>
</ul>
The videos for the talks are already available, too.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #55
2026-02-02T20:11:18+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from January 26 to February 2.</p>

A calm week for sure! The highlight this week is the fix for scrolling not starting when the main thread is blocked.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
Fixed</a> the problem of wheel event async scrolling doesn't start while the main thread is blocked. This should make WebKit feel more responsive even on heavier websites.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #54
2026-01-26T21:00:55+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from January 19 to January 26.</p>

The main event this week has been the creation of the branch for the upcoming stable series, accompanied by the first release candidate before 2.52.0. But there's more: the WPE port gains hyphenation support and the ability to notify of graphics buffer changes; both ports get graphics fixes and a couple of new Web features, and WPE-Android also gets a new stable release.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
Implemented</a> support for the :open</code>
pseudo-class on dialog and details elements. This is currently behind the
OpenPseudoClass</code> feature flag.</p>
  </div>
  

Implemented</a> the source</code> property for
ToggleEvent</code>. This can be used to run code dependent on the triggering element
in response to a popover or dialog toggle.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
Fixed</a> the rendering glitches with
wheel event asynchronous scrolling, which occurred when the page was scrolled
to areas not covered by tiles while the main thread was blocked.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
  
Support for
hyphenation</a>
has been added to WPE</a>. This requires
libhyphen</code> and can be disabled at build-time with the USE_LIBHYPHEN=OFF</code>
CMake option.</p>
  </div>
WPE Platform API 🧩</h3>

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p>
</div>
  
WPEPlatform gained support</a> to notify
changes in the configuration of graphics buffers allocated to render the
contents of a web view, either by handling the WPEView::buffers-changed</code>
signal or by overriding the WPEViewClass.buffers_changed</code> virtual function.
This feature is mainly useful for platform implementations which may need to
perform additional setup in advance, before updated web view contents are
provided in the buffers configured by WebKit.</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
WPE-Android 0.3.0</a>
has been released, and prebuilt packages are available at the Maven Central
repository</a>.
The main change in this this version is the update to WPE WebKit 2.50.4, which
is the most recent stable release.</p>
  </div>
  

A new branch has been
created</a> for the
upcoming 2.52.x stable release series of the GTK and WPE WebKit ports. The
first release candidates from this branch, WebKitGTK
2.51.90</a> and
WPE WebKit 2.51.90</a> are
now available. Testing and issue reports in Bugzilla</a>
are welcome to help with stabilization before the first stable release, which
is planned for mid-March.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #53
2026-01-19T19:25:32+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from December 26 to January 19.</p>

We're back! The first periodical of 2026 brings you performance optimizations, improvements to the memory footprint calculation, new APIs, the removal of the legacy Qt5 WPE backend, and as always, progress on JSC's Temporal implementation.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
The memory footprint calculation mechanism has been unified</a> across GTK, JSC, and WPE ports. Therefore, the expensive /proc/self/smaps</code> is not used anymore and the WPE uses /proc/self/statm</code> with extra cache now to prevent frequent file reading.</p>
  </div>
  

Added</a> a new webkit_context_menu_get_position()</code> function to the API that allows obtaining the pointer coordinates, relative to the web view origin, at the moment when a context menu was triggered.</p>
Additionally, behaviour of context menus has been made more consistent</a> between the GTK and WPE ports, and handling of GAction</code> objects attached to menu items has been rewritten</a> and improved</a> with the goal of better supporting context menus in the WPE port.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
In JavaScriptCore's implementation of Temporal, fixed a bug</a> in Temporal.PlainTime.from</code> that read options in the wrong order, which caused a test262 test to fail.</p>
  </div>
  

In JavaScriptCore's implementation of Temporal, fixed several bugs</a> in PlainYearMonth</code> methods and enabled all PlainYearMonth</code> tests that don't depend on the Intl</code> object. This completes the implementation of Temporal PlainYearMonth</code> objects in JSC.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
In WebKit's Skia graphics backend, fixed GrDirectContext management</a> for GPU resources. Operations on GPU-backed resources must use the context that created them, not the current thread's context. The fix stores GrDirectContext</code> at creation time for NativeImage</code> and uses surface->recordingContext()->asDirectContext()</code> for SkSurface, correcting multiple call sites that previously used the shared display's context incorrectly.</p>
  </div>
  

Damage propagation has been added</a> to the recently-added, non-composited mode in WPE.</p>
  </div>
  

In WebKit's Skia graphics backend for GTK/WPE, added canvas 2D operation recording</a> for GPU-accelerated rendering. Instead of executing drawing commands immediately, operations are recorded into an SkPicture</code> and replayed in batch when the canvas contents are needed, reducing GPU state change overhead for workloads with many small drawing operations, improving the MotionMark Canvas Lines</em> performance on embedded devices with low-end tiled GPUs.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
  
Due to Qt5 not receiving maintenance since mid-2025, the WPE Qt5 binding that used the legacy libwpe API has been removed</a> from the tree. The Qt6 binding remains part of the source tree</a>, which is a better alternative that allows using supported Qt versions, and is built atop the new WPEPlatform API, making it a future-proof option. The WPE Qt API may be enabled when configuring the build with CMake, using the ENABLE_WPE_QT_API</code> option.</p>
  </div>
WPE Platform API 🧩</h3>

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p>
</div>
  
The WPEScreenSyncObserver</code> class has been improved to support multiple callbacks</a>. Instead of a single callback set with wpe_screen_sync_observer_set_callback()</code>, clients of the API can now use wpe_screen_sync_observer_add_callback()</code> and wpe_screen_sync_observer_remove_callback()</code>. The observer will be paused automatically when there are no callbacks attached to it.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #52
2025-12-25T18:26:43+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from December 16 to December 25.</p>

Right during the holiday season 🎄, the last WIP installment of the year comes packed with new releases, a couple of functions added to the public API, cleanups, better timer handling, and improvements to MathML and WebXR support.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
Landed support for font-size: math</code></a>. Now
math-depth</code></a>
can automatically control the font size inside of <math></code> blocks, making
scripts and nested content smaller to improve readability and presentation.</p>
  </div>
  

Two new functions have been added</a> to
the public API:</p>


webkit_context_menu_item_get_gaction_target()</code> to obtain the GVariant</code>
associated with a context menu item created from a GAction</code>.</p>
</li>

webkit_context_menu_item_get_title()</code> may be used to obtain
the title of a context menu item.</p>
</div>

</li>
</ul>
Improved timers</a>, by making some of
them use the timerfd API</a>. This reduces
timer “lateness”—the amount of time elapsed between the configured trigger
time, and the effective one—, which in turn improves the perceived smoothness
of animations thanks to steadier frame delivery timings. Systems where the
timerfd_create</code> and timerfd_settime</code> functions are not available will
continue working as before.</p>
  </div>
  

On the WebXR front, support was added</a>
for  XR_TRACKABLE_TYPE_DEPTH_ANDROID</code> through the XR_ANDROID_trackables</code>
extension, which allows reporting depth information for elements that take part
in hit testing.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
Landed a change</a> that implements
non-composited page rendering in the WPE port. This new mode is disabled by
default, and may be activated by disabling the AcceleratedCompositing</code> runtime
preference. In such case, the frames are rendered using a simplified code path
that does not involve the internal WebKit compositor. Therefore it may offer a
better performance in some specific cases on constrained embedded devices.</p>
  </div>
  

Since version 2.10.2, the FreeType</a> library can be built
with direct support for loading fonts in the
WOFF2</a> format. Until now, the WPE and GTK WebKit
ports used libwoff2</a> in an intermediate step
to convert those fonts on-the-fly before handing them to FreeType for
rendering. The CMake build system will now detect when FreeType supports WOFF2
directly</a> and skip the conversion step.
This way, in systems which provide a suitable version of FreeType, libwoff2</code>
will no longer be needed.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
WPE Platform API 🧩</h3>

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p>
</div>
  
The legacy libwpe-based API can now be disabled at build
time</a>, by toggling the
ENABLE_WPE_LEGACY_API</code> CMake option. This allows removal of uneeded code when
an application is exclusively using the new WPEPlatform API.</p>
  </div>
WPE Android ↗</a>  🤖</h3>

Adaptation of WPE WebKit targeting the Android operating system.</p>
</div>
  
AHardwareBuffer</a>
is now supported</a> as backing for
accelerated graphics surfaces that can be shared across processes. This is the
last piece of the puzzle to use WPEPlatform on Android without involving
expensive operations to copy rendered frames back-and-forth between GPU and
system memory.</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
WebKitGTK
2.50.4</a> and
WPE WebKit 2.50.4</a> have
been released. These stable releases include a number of important patches for
security issues, and we urge users and distributors to update to this release
if they have not yet done it. An accompanying security advisory,
WSA-2025-0010</code>, has been published
(GTK</a>,
WPE</a>).</p>
Development releases of WebKitGTK
2.51.4</a> and
WPE WebKit 2.51.4</a> are
available as well, and may be used to preview upcoming features. As usual, bug
reports are welcome in Bugzilla</a>.</p>
  </div>
Community & Events 🤝</h2>
  
Paweł Lampe has published a blog
post</a>
that discusses various pre-rendering techniques useful in the context of using
WPE on embedded devices.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #51
2025-12-15T19:58:42+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from December 8 to December 15.</p>

In this end-of-year special have a new GMallocString helper that makes
management of malloc-based strings more efficient, development releases,
and a handful of advancements on JSC's implementation of Temporal, in
particular the PlainYearMonth class.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
Added GMallocString</a> class to WTF to adopt UTF8 C strings and make them WebKit first class citizens efficiently (no copies). Applied in GStreamer code together with other improvements by using CStringView</a>. Fixed other two</a> bugs</a> about string management.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
In JavaScriptCore's implementation of Temporal, added the with</code> method for PlainYearMonth</code> objects</a>, as well as the equals</code>, compare</code>, and valueOf</code> methods</a>, and also the from</code> method</a>. Also implemented the toPlainDate</code> method for PlainYearMonth objects</a>.</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
Development releases of WebKitGTK 2.51.3</a>
and WPE WebKit 2.51.3</a>
are now available. These include a number of API additions and new features,
and are intended to allow interested parties to test those in advance, prior
to the next stable release series. As usual, bug reports are
welcome in Bugzilla</a>.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #50
2025-12-08T20:26:32+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from December 1 to December 8.</p>

In this edition of the periodical we have further advancements on
the Temporal implementation, support for Vivante super-tiled format,
and an adaptation of the DMA-BUF formats code to the Android port.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
Implemented</a> the toString</code>, toJSON</code>, and toLocaleString</code> methods for PlainYearMonth</code> objects in JavaScriptCore's implementation of Temporal.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
BitmapTexture</code> and TextureMapper</code> were prepared</a> to handle textures where the logical size (e.g. 100×100) differs from the allocated size (e.g. 128×128) due to alignment requirements. This allowed to add support</a> for using memory-mapped GPU buffers in the Vivante super-tiled format available on i.MX platforms. Set WEBKIT_SKIA_USE_VIVANTE_SUPER_TILED_TILE_TEXTURES=1</code> to activate at runtime.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
WPE Platform API 🧩</h3>

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p>
</div>
  
The WPEBufferDMABufFormats</code> class has been renamed</a> to WPEBufferFormats</code>, as it can be used in situations where mechanisms other than DMA-BUF may be used for buffer sharing—on Android targets AHardwareBuffer</a> is used instead, for example. The naming change involved also WPEBufferFormatsBuilder</code> (renamed from WPEBufferDMABufFormatsBuilder</code>), and methods and signals in other classes that use these types. Other than the renames, there is no change in functionality.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #49
2025-12-02T14:15:36+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from November 24 to December 1.</p>

The main highlights for this week are the completion of `PlainMonthDay`
in Temporal, moving networking access for GstWebRTC to the WebProcess,
and Xbox Cloud Gaming now working in the GTK and WPE ports.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to)
playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
Xbox Cloud Gaming</a> is now usable in WebKitGTK and WPE
with the GstWebRTC backend, we had to fix non-spec compliant ICE candidates
handling</a> and add a WebRTC quirk
forcing max-bundle</code> in PeerConnections</a>
to make it work. Happy cloud gaming!</p>
  </div>
  

Support for remote inbound RTP statistics was improved in
303671@main</a>, we now properly report
framesPerSecond</code> and totalDecodeTime</code> metrics, those fields are used in the
Xbox Cloud Gaming service to show live stats about the connection and video
decoder performance in an overlay.</p>
  </div>
  

The GstWebRTC backend now relies on
librice</a> for its
ICE</a>.
The Sans-IO architecture of librice allows us to keep the WebProcess sandboxed
and to route WebRTC-related UDP and (eventually) TCP packets using the
NetworkProcess. This work landed in
303623@main</a>. The GNOME SDK should
also soon ship
librice</a>.</p>
  </div>
  

Support for seeking in loop</code>ing videos was fixed in
303539@main</a>.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
Implemented the valueOf</code></a> and
toPlainDate</code></a> for PlainMonthDay</code> objects.
This completes the implementation of
Temporal</a>
PlainMonthDay</code> objects in JSC!</p>
  </div>
WebKitGTK 🖥️</h2>
  
The GTK port has gained support</a> for
interpreting touch input as pointer
events</a>. This
matches the behaviour of other browsers by following the corresponding
specifications.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
  
Fixed</a> an issue that prevented
WPE from processing further input events after receiving a secondary mouse
button press.</p>
  </div>
	

Fixed</a> an issue that caused right
mouse button clicks to prevent processing of further pointer events.</p>
  </div>
WPE Platform API 🧩</h3>

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p>
</div>
  
We landed a patch</a> to add a new signal
in WPEDisplay</code> to notify when the connection to the native display has been lost.</p>
  </div>
Infrastructure 🏗️</h2>
  
Modernized the CMake modules used to find
libtasn1</a>,
libsecret</a>,
libxkbcommon</a>,
libhyphen</a>, and
Enchant</a> libraries.</p>
Note that this work removed the support for building against
Enchant</a> 1.x, and only version 2 will be
supported. The first stable release to require Enchant 2.x will be 2.52.0 due
in March 2026. Major Linux and BSD distributions have included Enchant 2
packages for years, and therefore this change is not expected to cause any
trouble. The Enchant library is used by the GTK port for spell checking.</p>
  </div>
Community & Events 🤝</h2>
  
We have published an
article</a> detailing our
work making MathML</a>
interoperable across browser engines! It has live demonstrations and feature
tables with our progress on WebKit support.</p>
  </div>
  

We have published new blogs post highlighting the most important changes in
both WPE WebKit</a>
and WebKitGTK</a> 2.50.
Enjoy!</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #48
2025-11-24T20:12:28+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from November 17 to November 24.</p>

In this week's rendition, the WebView snapshot API was enabled on the WPE
port, further progress on the Temporal and Trusted Types implementations,
and the release of WebKitGTK and WPE WebKit 2.50.2.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
A WebKitImage-based implementation of WebView snapshot landed</a> this week, enabling this feature on WPE when it was previously only available in GTK. This means you can now use webkit_web_view_get_snapshot</code> (and webkit_web_view_get_snapshot_finish</code>) to get a WebKitImage-representation of your screenshot.</p>
WebKitImage implements the GLoadableIcon</code> interface (as well as GIcon</code>'s), so you can get a PNG-encoded image using g_loadable_icon_load</code>.</p>
  </div>
  

Remove</a> incorrect early return in Trusted Types DOM attribute handling to align with spec changes.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
In JavaScriptCore's implementation of Temporal, implemented</a> the with</code> method for PlainMonthDay</code> objects.</p>
  </div>
  

In JavaScriptCore's implementation of Temporal, implemented</a> the from</code> and equals</code> methods for PlainMonthDay</code> objects.</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
WebKitGTK 2.50.2</a> and WPE WebKit 2.50.2</a> have been released.</p>
These stable releases include a number of patches for security issues, and as such a new security advisory, WSA-2025-0008</code>, has been issued (GTK</a>, WPE</a>).</p>
It is recommend to apply an additional patch</a> that fixes building with the JavaScriptCore “CLoop” interpreter is enabled, which is typicall for architectures where JIT compilation is unsupported. Releases after 2.50.2 will include it and manual patching will no longer be needed.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #47
2025-11-17T21:22:23+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from November 10 to November 17.</p>

This week's update is composed of a new CStringView internal API, more
MathML progress with the implementation of the "scriptlevel" attribute,
the removal of the Flatpak-based SDK, and the maintanance update of
WPEBackend-fdo.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
Implement</a> the MathML scriptlevel</code> attribute using math-depth</code>.</p>
  </div>
  

Finished implementing</a> CStringView, which is a wrapper around UTF8 C strings. It allows you to recover the string without making any copies and perform string operations safely by taking into account the encoding at compile time.</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
WPEBackend-fdo 1.16.1</a> has been released. This is a maintenance update which adds compatibility with newer Mesa versions.</p>
  </div>
Infrastructure 🏗️</h2>
  
Most of the Flatpak-based SDK was removed</a>. Developers are warmly encouraged to use the new SDK</a> for their contributions to the Linux ports, this SDK has been successfully deployed on EWS and post-commits bots.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #46
2025-11-10T23:04:17+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from November 3 to November 10.</p>

This week brought a hodgepodge of fixes in Temporal and multimedia,
a small addition to the public API in preparation for future work,
plus advances in WebExtensions, WebXR, and Android support.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
The platform-independent part of the WebXR Hit Test Module</a> has been implemented</a>. The rest, including the FakeXRDevice</code> mock implementation used for testing will be done later.</p>
  </div>
  

On the WebExtensions</a> front, parts of the WebExtensionCallbackHandler</code> code have been rewritten</a> to use more C++ constructs and helper functions, in preparation to share more code among the different WebKit ports.</p>
  </div>
  

A new WebKitImage</code> utility class
landed</a> this week. This image
abstraction is one of the steps towards delivering a new improved API for page
favicons</a>, and it is also expected to
be useful for the WebExtensions work, and to enable the webkit_web_view_get_snapshot()</code>
API for the WPE port.</p>
  </div>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
Videos with BT2100-PQ colorspace are now tone-mapped to
SDR</a> in WebKit's compositor, ensuring
colours do not appear washed out.</p>
  </div>
  

Lots of deadlock fixes this week, one among many in the MediaStream GStreamer
source element</a>.</p>
  </div>
  

Video frame rendering to WebGL was
fixed</a>. Another pending improvement is
GPU-to-GPU texture copies, which might be coming soon.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
JavaScriptCore's implementation of
Temporal</a>
received a number of improvements this week:</p>


Fixed a bug</a> that would cause wrong
results when adding a duration with a very large microseconds or nanoseconds
value to a PlainTime</code>.</p>
</li>

Fixed a rounding bug</a> of Instant</code> values.</p>
</li>

Fixed a bug</a> that resulted in
incorrect printing of certain Instant</code> values before the Epoch.</p>
</li>

Fixed a bug</a> that resulted in wrong
results instead of exceptions when a date addition operation would result in
an out-of-range date.</p>
</div>
</li>
</ul>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
WPE Android ↗</a>  🤖</h3>

Adaptation of WPE WebKit targeting the Android operating system.</p>
</div>
  
One of the last pieces needed to have the WPEPlatform API working on Android
has been merged</a>: a custom platform
EGL display implementation, and enabling the default display as fallback.</p>
  </div>
Community & Events 🤝</h2>
  
The dates for the next Web Engines Hackfest</a>
have been announced: it will take place from Monday, June 15th to Wednesday,
June 17th. As it has been the case in the last years, it will be possible to
attend both on-site, and remotely for those who cannot to travel to A Coruña.</p>
  </div>
  

The video recording for Adrian Pérez's “WPE Android 🤖 State of the Bot” talk from this year's edition of the WebKit Contributors' Meeting</a> has been published</a>. This was an update on what the Igalia WebKit team has been done during the last year to improve WPE WebKit on Android, and what is coming up next.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #45
2025-11-03T19:16:30+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from October 27 to November 3.</p>

A calmer week this time! This week we have the GTK and WPE ports implementing
the RunLoopObserver infrastructure, which enables more sophisticated scheduling
in WebKit Linux ports, as well as more information in webkit://gpu. On the Trusted
Types front, the timing of check was changed to align with spec changes.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
Implemented the RunLoopObserver</a>
infrastructure for GTK and WPE ports, a critical piece of technology previously
exclusive to Apple ports that enables sophisticated scheduling features like
OpportunisticTaskScheduler</code> for optimal garbage collection timing.</p>
The implementation refactored the GLib run loop to notify clients about
activity-state transitions (BeforeWaiting</code>, Entry</code>, Exit</code>, AfterWaiting</code>),
then moved from timer-based to
observer-based</a> layer flushing for more
precise control over rendering updates. Finally support was added to support
cross-thread scheduling of RunLoopObserver</code>s, allowing the ThreadedCompositor
to use them</a>, enabling deterministic
composition notifications across thread boundaries.</p>
  </div>
  

Changed</a> timing of Trusted Types
checks within DOM attribute handling to align with spec changes.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
The webkit://gpu</code> page now shows</a>
more</a>
information</a> like the list of
preferred buffer formats, the list of supported buffer formats, threaded
rendering information, number of MSAA samples, view size, and toplevel state.</p>
It is also now possible</a> to make the
page autorefresh every the given amount of seconds by passing a
?refresh=<seconds></code> parameter in the URL.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #44
2025-10-28T14:31:37+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from October 21 to October 28.</p>

This week has again seen a spike in activity related to WebXR and graphics
performance improvements. Additionally, we got in some MathML additions, a
fix for hue interpolation, a fix for WebDriver screenshots, development
releases, and a blog post about memory profiling.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
Support for WebXR Layers</a> has seen the
very first</a> changes
needed</a> to have them working on WebKit.
This is expected to take time to complete, but should bring improvements in
performance, rendering quality, latency, and power consumption down the road.</p>
  </div>
  

Work has started on the WebXR Hit Test
Module</a>, which will allow WebXR
experiences to check for real world surfaces. The JavaScript API bindings were
added</a>, followed by an initial XRRay
implementation</a>. More work is needed to
actually provide data from device sensors.</p>
  </div>
  

Now that the WebXR implementation used for the GTK and WPE ports is closer to
the Cocoa ones, it was possible to unify the
code</a> used to handle opaque buffers.</p>
  </div>
  

Implemented</a> the text-transform: math-auto</code> CSS property, which replaces the legacy mathvariant</code> system and is
used to make identifiers italic in MathML Core.</p>
  </div>
  

Implemented</a> the math-depth</code> CSS
extension from MathML Core.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
The hue interpolation
method</a>
for gradients has been fixed</a>. This is
expected to be part of the upcoming 2.50.2 stable release.</p>
  </div>
  

Usage of Multi-Sample
Antialiasing</a> (MSAA)
has been enabled</a> when using GPU
rendering, and then further changed</a>
to use dynamic
MSAA</a> to
improve performance.</p>
  </div>
  

Paths that contain a single arc, oval, or line have been changed to use a
specialized code path</a>, resulting in
improved performance.</p>
  </div>
  

WebGL content rendering will be handled by a new isolated process (dubbed “GPU
Process”) by default</a>. This is the
first step towards moving more graphics processing out of the process that
handles processing Web content (the “Web Process”), which will result in
increased resilience against buggy graphics drivers and certain kinds of
malicious content.</p>
  </div>
  

The internal webkit://gpu</code> page has been
improved</a> to also display information
about the graphics configuration used in the rendering process.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
WPE Platform API 🧩</h3>

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p>
</div>
  
The new WPE Platform, when using Skia (the default), now takes WebDriver
screenshots in the UI Process</a>, using
the final assembled frame that was sent to the system compositor. This fixes
the issues of some operations like 3D CSS animations that were not correctly
captured in screenshots.</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
The first development releases for the current development cycle have been
published: WebKitGTK
2.51.1</a> and
WPE WebKit 2.51.1</a>. These
are intended to let third parties test upcoming features and improvements and
as such bug reports for those are particularly welcome in
Bugzilla</a>. We are particularly interested in reports
related to WebGL, now that it is handled in an isolated process.</p>
  </div>
Community & Events 🤝</h2>
  
Paweł Lampe has published a blog post</a> that discusses GTK/WPE WebKit memory profiling using industry-standard tools and a built-in "Malloc Heap Breakdown" WebKit feature.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #43
2025-10-20T20:35:17+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from October 13 to October 20.</p>

This week was calmer than previous week but we still had some
meaningful updates. We had a Selenium update, improvements to
how tile sizes are calculated, and a new Igalian in the list
of WebKit committer!
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
Selenium's relative locators</a> are now supported after commit 301445@main</a>. Before, finding elements with locate_with(By.TAG_NAME, "input").above({By.ID: "password"})</code> could lead to "Unsupported locator strategy" errors.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
A patch landed</a> to compute the layers tile size, using a different strategy depending on whether GPU rendering is enabled, which improved the performance for both GPU and CPU rendering modes.</p>
  </div>
Community & Events 🤝</h2>
  
Our coworker Philip Chimento gained WebKit committer status</a>!</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #42
2025-10-13T20:02:47+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from October 6 to October 13.</p>

Another week with many updates in Temporal, the automated testing
infrastructure is now running WebXR API tests; and WebKitGTK gets
a fix for the janky Inspector resize while it drops support for
libsoup 2. Last but not least, there are fresh releases of both the
WPE and GTK ports including a security fix.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
When using libwebrtc, support has been added to register MDNS addresses of
local networks</a> as ICE candidates, to
avoid exposing private addresses.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
JavaScriptCore's implementation of
Temporal</a>
received a flurry of improvements:</p>


Implemented</a> the toString</code>,
toJSON</code>, and toLocaleString</code> methods for the PlainMonthDay</code> type.</p>
</li>

Brought the implementation of the round</code> method on TemporalDuration</code>
objects up to spec. This</a> is
the last in the series of patches that refactor TemporalDuration</code> methods to
use the InternalDuration</code> type, enabling mathematically precise computations
on time durations.</p>
</li>

Implemented basic support</a> for
the PlainMonthDay</code> type, without most methods yet.</p>
</li>

Brought the implementations of the since</code> and until</code> functions on Temporal
PlainDate</code> objects up to
spec</a>, improving the precision
of computations.</p>
</div>
</li>
</ul>
WebKitGTK 🖥️</h2>
  
WebKitGTK will no longer</a> support
using libsoup 2 for networking starting with version 2.52.0, due in March 2026.
An article in the
website</a> has
more details and migrations tips for application developers.</p>
  </div>
  

Fixed</a> the jittering
bug</a> of the docked Web Inspector window width and
height while dragging the resizer.</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
WebKitGTK
2.50.1</a> and
WPE WebKit 2.50.1</a> have
been released. These include a number of small fixes, improved text rendering
performance, and a fix for audio playback on Instagram.</p>
A security advisory, WSA-2025-0007</code>
(GTK</a>,
WPE</a>), covers one security
issue fixed in these releases. As usual, we recommend users and distributors to
keep their WPE WebKit and WebKitGTK packages updated.</p>
  </div>
Infrastructure 🏗️</h2>
  
Updated the API test runner</a> to
run monado-service</code> without standard input using XRT_NO_STDIN=TRUE</code>, which
allows the WPE and GTK bots to start validating the WebXR API.</p>
  </div>
  

Submitted a change</a> that allows
relaxing the DMA-BUF requirement when creating an OpenGL display in the
OpenXRCoordinator</code>, so that bots can run API tests in headless environments that
don't have that extension.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #41
2025-10-06T20:20:37+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from September 29 to October 6.</p>

Another exciting weekful of updates, this time we have a number of fixes on
MathML, content secutiry policy, and Aligned Trusted types, public API for
WebKitWebExtension has finally been added, and fixed enumeration of speaker
devices. In addition to that, there's ongoing work to improved compatibility
for broken AAC audio streams in MSE, a performance improvement to text
rendering with Skia was merged, and fixed multi-plane DMA-BUF handling in WPE.
Last but not least, The 2026 edition of the Web Engines Hackfest has been
announced! It will take place from June 15th to the 17th.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
Fixed</a> rendering for unknown elements in MathML.</p>
  </div>
  

Fixed</a> incorrect parsing of malformed require-trusted-types-for</code> CSP directive.</p>
  </div>
  

Align</a> reporting of Trusted Types violations with spec in case of multiple Content-Security-Policy headers.</p>
  </div>
  

Aligned Trusted Types event handler namespace checks</a> with an update to the specification.</p>
  </div>
  

Fixed</a> some incorrect handling of null</code> or undefined</code> policy values in Trusted Types.</p>
  </div>
  

On the WebExtensions front, the WebKitWebExtension API has finally been added</a>, after porting some more code</a> from Objective-C code to C++.</p>
  </div>
  

Improved alignment with MathML Core by making mfenced</code></a>, semantics</code> and maction</code></a> render like an mrow</code>, ignoring the subscriptshift</code>/superscriptshift</code> legacy attributes</a> and cleaning the User-Agent stylesheet</a> to more closely match the spec.</p>
  </div>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
Speaker device enumeration has been fixed</a> to properly enumerate ALSA PCM devices, while improving audio output device handling in general.</p>
  </div>
  

Improved compatibility for broken AAC audio streams in MSE is currently in review</a>.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
In JavaScriptCore's implementation of Temporal, improved the precision of addition and subtraction on Durations</a>.</p>
  </div>
  

In JavaScriptCore's implementation of Temporal, improved the precision of calculations</a> with the total()</code> function on Durations. This was joint work with Philip Chimento.</p>
  </div>
  

In JavaScriptCore's implementation of Temporal, continued refactoring</a> addition for Durations to be closer to the spec.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
Landed a patch</a> to build a SkTextBlob</code> when recording DrawGlyphs</code> operations for the GlyphDisplayListCache</code>, which shows a significant improvement in MotionMark “design” test when using GPU rendering.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
WPE Platform API 🧩</h3>

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p>
</div>
  
Improved</a> wpe_buffer_import_to_pixels()</code> to work correctly on non-linear and multi-plane DMA-BUF buffers by taking into account their modifiers when mapping the buffers.</p>
  </div>
Community & Events 🤝</h2>
  
The 2026 edition of the Web Engines Hackfest</a> has been announced</a>, and it will take place from June 15th to the 17th.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #40
2025-09-29T20:34:10+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from September 22 to September 29.</p>

Many news this week! We've got a performance improvement in the Vector
implementation, a fix that makes a SVG attribute work similarly to HTML,
and further advancements on WebExtension support. We also saw an update
to WPE Android, the test infrastructure can now run WebXR tests, WebXR
support in WPE Android, and a rather comprehensive blog post about the
performance considerations of WPE WebKit with regards to the DOM tree.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
Vector copies performance was improved</a> across the board, and specially for MSE use-cases</p>
  </div>
  

Fixed</a> SVG <a></code> rel attribute to work the same as HTML  <a></code>'s.</p>
  </div>
  

Work on WebExtension support continues with more Objective-C converted to C++, which allows all WebKit ports to reuse the same utility code</a> in all ports.</p>
  </div>
  

Added handling of the visibilityState</code> value</a> for inline WebXR sessions.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
WPE now supports importing pixels from non-linear DMABuf formats since commit 300687@main</a>. This will help the work to make WPE take screenshots from the UIProcess (WIP</a>) instead of from the WebProcess, so they match better what's actually shown on the screen.</p>
  </div>
  

Added</a> support for the WebXR passthroughFullyObscured rendering hint</a> when using the OpenXR backend.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
WPE Platform API 🧩</h3>

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p>
</div>
  
The build system will now compile WPEPlatform with warning-as-errors</a> in developer builds. This helps catch potential programming errors earlier.</p>
  </div>
WPE Android ↗</a>  🤖</h3>

Adaptation of WPE WebKit targeting the Android operating system.</p>
</div>
  
WPE-Android is being updated</a> to use WPE WebKit 2.50.0</a>. As usual, the ready-to-use packages will arrive in a few days to the Maven Central repository.</p>
  </div>
  

Added support to run WebXR content on Android, by using AHarwareBuffer</a> to share graphics buffers between the main process and the content rendering process. This required coordination to make the WPE-Android runtime glue expose the current JavaVM and Activity</a> in a way that WebKit could then use to initialize the OpenXR platform bindings.</p>
  </div>
Community & Events 🤝</h2>
  
Paweł Lampe has published in his blog the first post in a series</a> about different aspects of Web engines that affect performance, with a focus on WPE WebKit and interesting comparisons between desktop-class hardware and embedded devices. This first article analyzes how “idle” nodes in the DOM tree render measurable effects on performance (pun intended).</p>
  </div>
Infrastructure 🏗️</h2>
  
The test infrastructure can now run API
tests</a> that need WebXR support, by
using a dummy OpenXR compositor provided by the Monado</a>
runtime, along with the first tests and an additional one</a>
that make use of this.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #39
2025-09-22T23:12:36+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from September 15 to September 22.</p>

The first release in a new stable series is now out! And despite that,
the work continues on WebXR, multimedia reliability, and WebExtensions
support.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
Fixed running WebXR tests</a> in the WebKit build infrastructure, and made a few more</a> of them run. This both increases the amount of WebXR code covered during test runs, and helps prevent regressions in the future.</p>
  </div>
  

As part of the ongoing work to get WebExtensions</a> support in the GTK and WPE WebKit ports, a number of classes have been converted</a> from Objective-C</a> to C++</a>, in order to use share their functionality among all ports.</p>
  </div>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
A number of multimedia-related memory leaks have been plugged</a>. These have been found thanks to the GStreamer leak tracer</a>.</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
WebKitGTK 2.50.0</a> and WPE WebKit 2.50.0</a> are now available. These are the first releases of a new stable series, and are the result of the last six months of work. This development cycle focused on rendering performance improvements, improved support for font features, and more. New public API</a> has been added to obtain the theme color</a> declared by Web pages.</p>
For those longer to integrate newer releases, which we know can be a longer process when targeting embedded devices, we have also published WPE WebKit 2.48.7</a> with a few stability and security fixes.</p>
Accompanying these releases there is security advisory WSA-2025-0006</code> (GTK</a>, WPE</a>), with information about solved security issues. As usual, we encourage everybody to use the most recent versions where such issues are known to be fixed.</p>
Bug reports are always welcome at the WebKit Bugzilla</a>.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #38
2025-09-15T19:42:13+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from September 8 to September 15.</p>

The JavaScriptCore implementation of Temporal continues to be polished,
as does SVGAElement, and WPE and WebKitGTK accessibility tests can now
run (but they are not passing yet).
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
Add</a> support for the hreflang</code> attribute on SVGAElement</code>, this helps to align it with HTMLAnchorElement</code>.</p>
  </div>
  

An improvement in harnessing code for A11y tests</a> allowed to unblock many tests marked as Timeout/Skip in WPEWebKit and WebKitGTK ports. These tests are not passing yet, but they are at least running now.</p>
  </div>
  

Add</a> suport for the type attribute on SVGAElement</code>.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
In the JavaScriptCore (JSC) implementation of Temporal, refactored the implementations of the difference operations</a> (since and until) for the TemporalPlainTime type in order to match the spec. This enables further work on Temporal, which is being done incrementally.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #37
2025-09-08T19:46:56+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from September 1 to September 8.</p>

In this week's installment of the periodical, we have better spec compliance of
JavaScriptCore's implementation of Temporal, an improvement in how gamepad events
are handled, WPE WebKit now implements a helper class which allows test baselines
to be aligned with other ports, and finally, an update on recent work on Sysprof.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
Until now, unrecognized gamepads didn't emit button presses or axis move events if they didn't map to the standard mapping layout according to W3C (https://www.w3.org/TR/gamepad/#remapping). Now we ensure that unrecognized gamepads always map to the standard layout</a>, so events are always emitted if a button is pressed or the axis is moved.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
In the JavaScriptCore (JSC) implementation of Temporal, the compare()</code> method on Temporal durations was modified to follow the spec</a>, which increases the precision with which comparisons are made. This is another step towards a full spec-compliant implementation of Temporal in JSC.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
  
Added a specific implementation for helper class ImageAdapter for WPE</a>. This class allows to load image resources that until now were only shipped in WebKitGTK and other ports. This change has aligned many WPE specific test baselines with the rest of WebKit ports, which were now removed.</p>
  </div>
Community & Events 🤝</h2>
  
Sysprof has received a variety of new features, improvements, and bugfixes, as part of the integration with Webkit. We continued pushing this front in the past 6 months! A few highlights:</p>

An important bug with counters was fixed, and further integration was added to WebKit</li>
It is now possible to hide marks from the waterfall view</li>
Further work on the remote inspector integration, wkrictl, was done</li>
</ul>
Read more here</a>!</p>
</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #36
2025-09-01T21:02:56+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from August 25 to September 1.</p>

The rewrite of the WebXR support continues, as do improvements
when building for Android, along with smaller fixes in multimedia
and standards compliance.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
The WebXR implementation has gained
input</a> through OpenXR, including
support for the hand interaction—useful for devices which only support
hand-tracking—and the generic simple profile. This was soon followed by the
addition</a> of support for the Hand
Input module</a>.</p>
  </div>
  

Aligned</a> the SVGStyleElement</code>
type and media attributes with HTMLStyleElement</code>'s.</p>
  </div>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
Support for FFMpeg GStreamer audio decoders was
re-introduced</a>
because the alternative decoders making use of FDK-AAC might not be available
in some distributions and Flatpak runtimes.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
Usage of fences has been introduced</a>
to control frame submission of rendered WebXR content when using OpenXR. This
approach avoids blocking in the renderer process waiting for frames to be
completed, resulting in slightly increased performance.</p>
  </div>
  

Loading a font from a collection will now iterate until finding the correct
one</a>. This solved a few font rendering
issues.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
WPE Platform API 🧩</h3>

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p>
</div>
  
Changed WPEPlatform to be built as part of the libWPEWebKit
library</a>. This avoids duplicating some
code in different libraries, brings in a small reduction in used space, and
simplifies installation for packagers. Note that the wpe-platform-2.0</code> module
is still provided, and applications that consume the WPEPlatform API must still
check and use it.</p>
  </div>
WPE Android ↗</a>  🤖</h3>

Adaptation of WPE WebKit targeting the Android operating system.</p>
</div>
  
Support for sharing AHardwareBuffer</code> handles across processes is now
available</a>. This lays out the
foundation to use graphics memory directly across different WebKit subsystems
later on, making some code paths more efficient, and paves the way towards
enabling the WPEPlatform API on Android.</p>
  </div>
  

The MediaSession
API</a> has been
disabled when building for Android</a>.
The existing implementation would attempt to use the MPRIS D-Bus
interface</a>, which
does not work on Android.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #35
2025-08-25T19:42:11+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from August 18 to August 25.</p>

This week continue improvements in the WebXR front, more layout tests passing,
support for CSS's generic font family for math, improvements in the graphics
stack, and an Igalia Chat episode!
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
Align the experimental CommandEvent</code> with recent specification changes</a>. This should finalise the implementation ready to enable by default.</p>
  </div>
  

The WebXR implementation has gained support to funnel usage permission requests through the public API</a> for immersive sessions. Note that this is a basic implementation, and fine-grained control of requested session capabilities may be added at a later time.</p>
The GTK MiniBrowser has been updated to handle WebKitXRPermissionRequest</a> accordingly.</p>
  </div>
  

Implemented rawKeyDown</code> and rawKeyUp</code> in WKTestRunner</a> for WPEWebKit and WebkitGTK, which made more than 300 layout tests pass.</p>
  </div>
  

Enable command</code> and commandfor</code> attributes</a> in stable. These are part of the invoker commands API</a> for buttons.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
The CSS font-family: math</code> generic font family is now supported in WebKit</a>. This is part</a> of the CSS Fonts Level 4 specification.</p>
  </div>
  

The WebXR implementation has gained to ability to use GBM graphics buffers as fallback</a>, which allows usage with drivers that do not provide the EGL_MESA_image_dma_buf_export</code> extension, yet use GBM for buffer allocation.</p>
  </div>
  

The WebXR render loop has been simplified by using a work queue</a> and offloading the session handling to the render thread.</p>
  </div>
Community & Events 🤝</h2>
  
Early this month, a new episode of Igalia Chat titled "Get Down With the WebKit"</a> was released, where Brian Kardell and Eric Meyer talk with Igalia's Alejandro (Alex) Garcia about the WebKit project and Igalia's WPE port.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #34
2025-08-18T19:21:39+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from August 11 to August 18.</p>

This week we saw updates in WebXR support, better support for changing audio outputs,
enabling of GLib API when building the JSCOnly port, improvements to damaging propagation,
WPE platform enhancements, and more!
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
Complementing our WebXR efforts, it is now possible to query whether a WebView is in immersive mode</a> and request to leave immersive mode</a>.</p>
  </div>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
Changing audio outputs has been changed</a> to use gst_device_reconfigure_element()</code> instead of relying on knowledge about how different GStreamer sink elements handle the choice of output device. Note that audio output selection support is in development and disabled by default, the ExposeSpeakers</code>, ExposeSpeakersWithoutMicrophone</code>, and PerElementSpeakerSelection</code> features flags may be toggled to test it.</p>
While most systems use PipeWire or PulseAudio these days, some systems may need a fix for the corresponding ALSA and OSS elements</a>, which has been already merged in GStreamer.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
Support for enabling the GLib API when building the JSCOnly port has been added</a>.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
With the #44192</a> PR landed, the damage propagation feature is now able to propagate damage from accelerated 2D canvas.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
  
Fixed minor bug in WPE's: pressing Esc key inside a dialog closes dialog. See PR #49265</a>.</p>
  </div>
WPE Platform API 🧩</h3>

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p>
</div>
  
The WPEPlatform DRM backend can now report available input devices</a>. This is mainly used to support Interaction Media Features</a> queries, which allow web sites to better adapt to the available input devices.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #33
2025-08-11T21:07:12+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from July 29 to August 11.</p>

This update covers two weeks, including a deluge of releases and graphics work.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
CSS animations with a cubic-bezier timing function are now</a> correctly rendered</p>
  </div>
  

The rewrite of the WebXR support continued</a> making</a> steady</a> progress</a>, and is getting closer to being able to render content again.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
  
The WPE port gained basic undo support</a> in text inputs.</p>
  </div>
WPE Android ↗</a>  🤖</h3>

Adaptation of WPE WebKit targeting the Android operating system.</p>
</div>
  
WPE-Android has been updated to use WebKit 2.48.5</a>. This update particular interest for development on Android is the support for using the system logd</code> service, which can be configured using system properties. For example, the following will enable logging all warnings:</p>
adb</span> shell setprop debug.log.WPEWebKit all</span></span>
adb</span> shell setprop log.tag.WPEWebKit WARN</span></span></code></pre>
Updated prebuilt packages are also available in the Central repository</a>.</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
Stable releases of WebKitGTK 2.48.5</a> and WPE WebKit 2.48.5</a> are now available. These include the fixes and improvements from the corresponding</a> 2.48.4 ones</a>, and additionally solve a number of security issues. Advisory WSA-2025-0005 (GTK</a>, WPE</a>) covers the included security patches.</p>
  </div>
  

WebKitGTK 2.49.3</a> and WPE WebKit 2.49.4</a> have been released, intended to test out upcoming features and improvements. As usual, issue reports are welcome in Bugzilla</a>, and are particularly important now to stabilize the newly created branch</a> for the upcoming 2.50.x series.</p>
  </div>
  

Ruby was re-added to the GNOME SDK, thanks to Michael Catanzaro and Jordan Petridis. So we're happy to report that the WebKitGTK nightly builds for GNOME Web Canary are now fixed and Canary updates were resumed.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #32
2025-07-28T21:04:17+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from July 21 to July 28.</p>

This week the trickle of improvements to the graphics stack continues with
more font handling improvements and tuning of damage information; plus the
WPEPlatform Wayland backend gets server-side decorations with some compositors.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
The
font-variant-emoji</a>
CSS property is now enabled</a> by
default in the GTK and WPE ports.</p>
  </div>
  

Font synthesis properties (synthetic bold/italic) are now correctly
handled</a>, so that fonts are rendered
bold or italic even when the font itself does not provide these variants.</p>
  </div>
  

A few minor</a>
improvements</a> to the damage
propagation feature have landed.</p>
  </div>
  

The screen device scaling factor in use is now
shown</a> in the webkit://gpu</code> internal
information page.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
WPE Platform API 🧩</h3>

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p>
</div>
  
The Wayland backend included with WPEPlatform has been taught how to request
server-side decorations</a> using the XDG
Decoration protocol</a>.
This means that compositors that support the protocol will provide window
frames and title bars for WPEToplevel</code> instances. While this is a welcome
quality of life improvement in many cases, window decorations will not be shown
on Weston and Mutter (used by GNOME Shell among others), as they do not support
the protocol at the moment.</p>
</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #31
2025-07-21T19:24:11+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from July 14 to July 21.</p>

In this week we had a fix for the libsoup-based resource loader on platforms
without the shared-mime-info package installed, a fix for SQLite usage in
WebKit, ongoing work on the GStreamer-based WebRTC implementation including
better encryption for its default DTLS certificate and removal of a dependency,
and an update on the status of GNOME Web Canary version.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
ResourceLoader delegates local resource loading (e.g. gresources) to ResourceLoaderSoup, which in turn uses g_content_type_guess</code> to identify their content type. In platforms where shared-mime-info</code> is not available, this fails silently and reports "text/plain", breaking things such as PDFjs.</p>
A patch was submitted</a> to use MIMETypeRegistry</code> to get the MIME type of these local resources, falling back to g_content_type_guess</code> when that fails, making internal resource loading more resilient.</p>
  </div>
  

Fixed</a> "PRAGMA incrementalVacuum" for SQLite, which is used to reclaim freed filesystem space.</p>
  </div>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
Most web engines migrated from a default DTLS certificate signed with a RSA key to a ECDSA p-256 key, almost a decade ago. GstWebRTC is now also signing its default DTLS certificate with that private key format</a>. This improves compatibility with various SFUs, the Jitsi Video Bridge among them.</p>
  </div>
  

Work is on-going in GStreamer, adding support for getting the currently selected ICE candidates pair</a> and a new webrtcbin signal to close the connection</a>.</p>
  </div>
  

The WebKit GStreamer MediaRecorder</a> backend no longer depends on GstTranscoder</a></p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
WPE Android ↗</a>  🤖</h3>

Adaptation of WPE WebKit targeting the Android operating system.</p>
</div>
  
Changed libpsl to include built-in public-suffix data</a> when building WPE for Android. Among other duties, having this working correctly is important for site isolation, resource loading, and cookie handling.</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
The GNOME Web Canary build has been stale for several weeks, since the GNOME nightly SDK was updated to freedesktop SDK 25.08beta which no longer ships one of the WebKitGTK build dependencies (Ruby). We will do our best to get the builds back to a working state, soon hopefully.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #30
2025-07-14T20:01:14+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from July 7 to July 14.</p>

This week saw a fix for IPv6 scope-ids in DNS responses, frame pointers
re-enabled in JSC developer builds, and a significant improvement to
emoji fonts selection.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
Fixed</a> support for IPv6 scope-ids</a> in DNS responses.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
Developer builds of JSC now</a> default to having frame pointers, to allow for more useful backtraces.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
Improved the selection of emoji fonts to follow the spec</a> more closely, and ensure the choice is honored while iterating over fallback fonts</a>.</p>
This work has been done in preparation to enable</a> the support for the new font-variant-emoji CSS property</a> down the line.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #29
2025-07-07T20:49:35+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from June 30 to July 7.</p>

Improvements to Sysprof and related dependencies, WebKit's usage of
std::variant replaced by mpark::variant, major WebXR overhauling,
and support for the logd service on Android, are all part of this
week's bundle of updates.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
The WebXR</a> support in the GTK and WPE WebKit ports has been ripped off</a> in preparation for an overhaul that will make it better fit WebKit's multi-process architecture.</p>
The new implementation, still based on OpenXR</a> is being re-added piecewise, starting with the foundational support code</a> to coordinate XR content inside the Web engine. Next starting and stopping immersive sessions</a> was brought back, and a basic render loop</a>.</p>
Note these are the first steps on this effort, and there is still plenty to do before WebXR experiences work again.</p>
  </div>
  

Changed</a> usage of std::variant</code> in favor of an alternative implementation based on mpark::variant</a>, which reduces the size of the built WebKit library—currently saves slightly over a megabyte for release builds.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
WPE Android ↗</a>  🤖</h3>

Adaptation of WPE WebKit targeting the Android operating system.</p>
</div>
  
Logging support is being improved to submit entries</a> to the logd</code> service on Android, and also to configure logging</a> using a system property. This makes debugging and troubleshooting issues on Android more manageable, and is particularly welcome to develop WebKit itself.</p>
While working on this feature, the definition of logging channels was simplified</a>, too.</p>
  </div>
Community & Events 🤝</h2>
  
WebKit on Linux integrates with Sysprof and reports a plethora of marks. As we report more information to Sysprof, we eventually pushed Sysprof internals to its limit! To help with that, we're adding a new feature to Sysprof: hiding marks from view.</p>
This required diving a little deeper into the stack, and add a new feature to a dependency</a> as well.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #28
2025-07-01T13:29:10+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from June 24 to July 1.</p>

This was a slow week, where the main highlight are new development
releases of WPE WebKit and WebKitGTK.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
Made some further progress</a> bringing the 32-bit version of OMG closer to the 64-bit one</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
WebKitGTK 2.49.3</a> and WPE WebKit 2.49.3</a> have been released. These are development snapshots intended to allow those interested to test the new features and improvement which will be part of the next stable release series. As usual, bug reports are welcome in the WebKit Bugzilla</a>.</p>
  </div>
Community & Events 🤝</h2>
  
The video recording for the talk “Jumping Over the Garden Wall - WPE WebKit on
Android” from this year's Web Engines
Hackfest</a> is now available for
watching</a>.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #27
2025-06-23T19:58:31+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from June 16 to June 23.</p>

This week saw a variety of fixes on multimedia, including GStreamer, a fix
for JSC, and the addition of analog gamepad buttons support for WPE.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
WebRTC DTMF</a> support was recently implemented</a> in our GstWebRTC backend.</p>
  </div>
  

The WebCodecs VideoFrame copyTo()</code> function now correctly handles odd-sized frames</a>.</p>
  </div>
  

Multiple MediaRecorder-related improvements landed in main recently (1</a>, 2</a>, 3</a>, 4</a>), and also in GStreamer</a>.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
JSC saw some fixes</a> in i31 reference types when using Wasm GC.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
  
WPE now has support for analog gamepad buttons</a> when using libwpe. Since version 1.16.2 libwpe has the capability to handle analog gamepad button events, but the support on the WPE side was missing. It has now been added, and will be enabled when the appropriate versions of libwpe are used.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #26
2025-06-16T21:44:56+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from May 27 to June 16.</p>

After a short hiatus coinciding with this year's edition of the Web Engines
Hackfest, this issue covers a mixed bag of new API features, releases,
multimedia, and graphics work.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
A new WebKitWebView::theme-color</code> property has
been</a>
added</a> to the public API, along with a
corresponding webkit_web_view_get_theme_color()</code> getter. Its value follows
that of the theme-color</code> metadata
attribute</a>
declared by pages loaded in the web view. Although applications may use the
theme color in any way they see fit, the expectation is that it will be used to
adapt their user interface (as in this
example</a>) to
complement the Web content being displayed.</p>

	
	

		Video showing a screen capture of a GTK application that displays a website
		that has buttons to change colour scheme of the Web content; changing the
		colour scheme also makes the background and text color of the window title
		change accordingly.
	</p>
</video>
  </div>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
The video capture pipeline has gained the ability to optionally rotate the
input</a> before encoding.</p>
  </div>
WebKitGTK 🖥️</h2>
  
Damage propagation has been toggled for the GTK
port</a>: for now only a single rectangle
is passed to the UI process, which then is used to let GTK know which part of a
WebKitWebView</code> has received changes since the last repaint. This is a first
step to get damage tracking code widely tested, with further improvements to be
enabled later when considered appropriate.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
WPE Android ↗</a>  🤖</h3>

Adaptation of WPE WebKit targeting the Android operating system.</p>
</div>
  
WPE-Android 0.2.0</a>
has been released. The main change in this version is the update to WPE WebKit
2.48.3, which is the first that can be built for Android out of the box,
without needing any additional patching. Thanks to this, we expect that the WPE
WebKit version used will receive more frequent updates going forward. The
prebuilt packages available at the Maven Central
repository</a>
have been updated accordingly.</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
WebKitGTK
2.49.2</a> and
WPE WebKit 2.49.2</a> have
been released. These are development snapshots and are intended to let those
interested test out upcoming features and improvements, and as usual issue
reports are welcome in Bugzilla</a>.</p>
  </div>
Community & Events 🤝</h2>
  
This year's Web Engines Hackfest</a> had two
WebKit-related
sessions</a>, and
the slides are available already for the WPE-Android
talk</a>
and the Multimedia in WebKit
session</a>.
Video recordings will be available later on.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit at the Web Engines Hackfest 2025
2025-05-30T19:21:00+03:00
The Web Engines Hackfest 2025 is kicking off next Monday in A Coruña and among
all the interesting talks and
sessions</a> about
different engines, there are a few that can be interesting to people involved
one way or another with WebKitGTK and WPE:</p>


“Jumping Over the Garden Wall - WPE WebKit on
Android”</a>, by Adrián Pérez
(Monday 2nd at 16:00 CEST) with a status update about the effort to bring
WebKit into Android via WPE.</p>
</li>

“Multimedia in
WebKit”</a>, by Philippe
Normand (Tuesday 3rd at 12:00 CEST), will focus on the current status and
future plans for the multimedia stack in WebKit.</p>
</li>
</ul>
All talks will be live streamed and a Jitsi Meet link will be available for
those interested in participating remotely. You can find all the details at
webengineshackfest.org</a>.</p>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #25
2025-05-26T19:38:40+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from May 19 to May 26.</p>

This week saw updates on the Android version of WPE, the introduction
of a new mechanism to support memory-mappable buffers which can lead
to better performance, a new gamepad API to WPE, and other improvements.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
Implemented</a> support for the new 'request-close' command for dialog elements.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
Added</a> support for using the GDB JIT API when dynamically generating code in JSC.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
Added</a> support for memory-mappable GPU buffers. This mechanism allows to allocate linear textures that can be used from OpenGL, and memory-mapped into CPU-accessible memory. This allows to update the pixel data directly, bypassing the usual glCopyTexSubImage2D</code> logic that may introduce implicit synchronization / perform staging copies / etc. (driver-dependant).</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
WPE Platform API 🧩</h3>

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p>
</div>
  
Landed a patch</a> to add a gamepads API to WPE Platform with an optional default implementation using libmanette</a>.</p>
  </div>
WPE Android ↗</a>  🤖</h3>

Adaptation of WPE WebKit targeting the Android operating system.</p>
</div>
  
WPE-Android has been updated</a> to use WebKit 2.48.2</a>. Updated packages will be available in the Central repository</a> in the coming days.</p>
  </div>
  

The WPE-Android MiniBrowser no longer crashes</a> when opening the “Settings” activity when the system-wide dark user interface mode is enabled.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #24
2025-05-19T21:10:35+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from May 12 to May 19.</p>

This week focused on infrastructure improvements, new releases that
include security fixes, and featured external projects that use the
GTK and WPE ports.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
Fixed</a>
a reference cycle in the mediastreamsrc</code> element, which prevented its disposal.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
Added an internal class</a> that will be
used to represent Temporal Duration</code> objects in a way that allows for more
precise calculations. This is not a user-visible change, but will enable future
PRs to advance Temporal support in JSC towards completion.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
WPE Platform API 🧩</h3>

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p>
</div>
  
Added</a>
an initial demo application to the GTK4 WPEPlatform implementation.</p>
</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
WebKitGTK
2.48.2</a> and
WPE WebKit 2.48.2</a> have
been released. These are paired with a security advisory (WSA-2025-0004</code>:
GTK</a>,
WPE</a>), and therefore it is
advised to update.</p>
On top of security fixes, these release also include correctness fixes, and
support for CSS Overscroll
Behaviour</a>
is now enabled by default.</p>
  </div>
Community & Events 🤝</h2>
  
GNOME Web has
gained</a> a
preferences page that allows toggling WebKit features at run-time. Tech Preview
builds of the browser will show the settings page by default, while in regular
releases it is hidden and may be enabled with the following command:</p>
gsettings</span> set org.gnome.Epiphany.ui webkit-features-page</span> true</span></span></code></pre>
This should allow frontend developers to test upcoming features more easily. Note that the settings for WebKit features are not</em> persistent, and they will be reset to their default state on every launch.</p>

	
	
</picture>
  </div>
Infrastructure 🏗️</h2>
  
Landed an improvement</a> to error
reporting in the script within WebKit that runs test262</code> JavaScript tests.</p>
  </div>
  

The WebKit Test Runner (WKTR) will no longer
crash</a> if invalid UTF-8 sequences
are written to the standard error stream, (e.g. from 3rd party libraries'
debugging options.</p>
  </div>
  

Experimentation is ongoing to un-inline String::find()</code>, which saves ~50 KiB
in the resulting binary size worth of repeated implementations of SIMD “find
character in UTF-16” and “find character in UTF-32” algorithms. Notably, the
algorithm for “find character in ASCII string” was not even part of the
inlining.</p>
  </div>
  
Added the LLVM
repository</a> to the
WebKit container SDK. Now it is possible to easily install Clang 20.x with
wkdev-setup-default-clang --version=20</code>.</p>
  </div>
  

Figured out that a performance bug related to jump threading optimization in
Clang 18 resulted in a bottleneck adding up to five minutes of build time in
the container SDK. This may be fixed by updating to Clang 20.x.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #23
2025-05-12T19:29:21+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from May 5 to May 12.</p>

This week saw one more feature enabled by default, additional support to
track memory allocations, continued work on multimedia and WebAssembly.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
The Media Capabilities</a> API is now enabled by default. It was previously available as a run-time option in the WPE/WebKitGTK API (WebKitSettings:enable-media-capabilities</code>), so this is just a default tweak</a>.</p>
  </div>
  

Landed a change</a> that integrates malloc heap breakdown functionality with non-Apple ports. It works similarly to Apple's one</a> yet in case of non-Apple ports the per-heap memory allocation statistics are printed to stdout periodically for now. In the future this functionality will be integrated with Sysprof.</p>
  </div>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
Support for WebRTC RTP header extensions was improved</a>, a RTP header extension for video orientation metadata handling was introduced</a> and several simulcast tests are now passing</a></p>
  </div>
  

Progress is ongoing on resumable player suspension, which will eventually allow us to handle websites with lots of simultaneous media elements better in the GStreamer ports, but this is a complex task.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
The in-place Wasm interpreter (IPInt) port to 32-bits has seen some more work</a>.</p>
  </div>
  

Fixed</a> a bug in OMG caused by divergence with the 64-bit version. Further syncing</a> is underway</a>.</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
Michael Catanzaro has published a writeup on his blog</a> about how the WebKitGTK API versions have changed over time.</p>
  </div>
Infrastructure 🏗️</h2>
  
Landed</a> some improvements in the WebKit container SDK for Linux, particularly in error handling.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #22
2025-05-06T13:27:02+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from April 15 to May 6.</p>

WPEPlatform continued closing the feature gap with
libwpe</code>-based WPE backends, WPE got improved clipboard
support, and JSC gets assorted improvements.
</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
The Cookie Store API</a> is now enabled</a> by default, and CSS Overscroll Behaviour</a> was enabled as well</a>.</p>
  </div>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
The GstWPE2 GStreamer plugin landed in GStreamer
main</a>,
it makes use of the WPEPlatform API. It will ship in GStreamer 1.28. Compared
to GstWPE1 it provides the same features, but improved support for NVIDIA
GPUs. The main regression is lack of audio support, which is work-in-progress,
both on the WPE and GStreamer sides.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
Work on enabling the in-place Wasm interpreter (IPInt) on 32-bits has progressed</a> nicely</a></p>
  </div>
  

The JSC tests runner can now guard</a> against a pathological failure mode.</p>
  </div>
  

In JavaScriptCore's implementation of
Temporal</a>,
Tim Chevalier fixed the parsing of RFC
9557</a> annotations in date
strings to work according to the standard. So now syntactically valid but
unknown annotations [foo=bar]</code> are correctly ignored, and the !</code> flag in an
annotation is handled correctly. Philip Chimento expanded the test suite
around this feature and fixed a couple of crashes in Temporal.</p>
  </div>
  

Math.hypot(x, y, z)</code> received a fix</a> for a corner case.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
  
WPE now uses the new pasteboard API</a>, aligning it with the GTK port, and enabling features that were previously disabled. Note that the new features work only with WPEPlatform, because libwpe</code>-based backends are limited to access clipboard text items.</p>
  </div>
WPE Platform API 🧩</h3>

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p>
</div>
  
A new interface for handling clipboard requests</a> was added, with a generic implementation that only operated within WebKit.</p>
Platform backends may add their own clipboard handling, with the Wayland one being the first one to</a>, using wl_data_device_manager</code>.</p>
This continues the effort to close the feature gap between the “traditional” libwpe</code>-based WPE backends and the new WPEPlatform ones.</p>
  </div>
Community & Events 🤝</h2>
  
Carlos García has published a blog post about the optimizations introduced in
the WPE and GTK WebKit
ports</a>
since the introduction of Skia replacing Cairo for 2D rendering. Plus, there
are some hints about what is coming next.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #21
2025-04-14T19:41:16+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from April 7 to April 14.</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
It is now possible</a> to customize the limit of the content resources kept for the network page of WebInspector.</p>
  </div>
  

Reduce the amount of data kept</a> for network page of WebInspector after eviction in case the memory limit is exceeded.</p>
  </div>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
On the WebRTC front, basic support for Rapid Synchronization</a> was added, along with a couple of spec coverage improvements (https://commits.webkit.org/293567@main, https://commits.webkit.org/293569@main).</p>
  </div>
  

Fixed</a> some upstream regressions in OMG.</p>
  </div>
  

Dispatch</a> a "canceled" error event for all queued utterances in case of SpeechSynthesis.</p>
  </div>
  

Support for the Camera desktop portal</a> was added recently</a>, it will benefit mostly Flatpak apps using WebKitGTK, such as GNOME Web, for access to capture devices, which is a requirement for WebRTC support.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
Fixed</a> a corner case in BBQJIT.</p>
  </div>
  

Work continued</a> on porting the in-place wasm interpreter (IPInt) to 32-bits.</p>
  </div>
  

We have been working on bringing the Temporal implementation in JSC up to the current spec, and a step towards that goal was implemented in WebKit PR #43849</a>. This PR changes how calendar annotation key parsing works; it doesn't change anything observable, but sets the groundwork for parsing calendar critical flags and unknown annotations.</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
The recent releases of WebKitGTK and WPE WebKit 2.48 introduced a number of improvements to performance, reduced resource usage, better support for web platform features and standards, multimedia, and more!</p>
Read more about these updates in the freshly published articles for WebKitGTK</a>, and WPE WebKit</a>.</p>
  </div>
Community & Events 🤝</h2>
  
Support for Display device permission requests</a> was recently added in GNOME Web, this is a requirement for Screen Capture</a> handling on the User-Agent side.</p>
  </div>
  

Pawel Lampe published a blog post</a> on the damage propagation feature. This feature reduces browser's GPU utilization at the expense of increased CPU and memory utilization in the WPE and GTK WebKit ports.</p>
  </div>
  

Our efforts to bring GstWebRTC support to WebKitGTK and WPEWebKit also include direct contributions to GStreamer. We recently</a> improved WebRTC spec compliance in webrtcbin</code>, by making the SDP mid attribute optional in offers and answers.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #20
2025-04-07T21:49:00+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from March 31 to April 7.</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
By default we divide layers that need to be painted into 512x512 tiles, and
only paint the tiles that have changed. We record each layer/tile combination
into a SkPicture</code> and replay the painting commands in worker threads, either
on the CPU or the GPU. A change was
landed</a> to improve the algorithm,
by recording the changed area of each layer into a single SkPicture</code>, and for
each tile replay the same picture, but clipped to the tile dimensions and
position.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
WPE Platform API 🧩</h3>

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p>
</div>
  
A WPE Platform-based implementation of Media Queries' Interaction Media
Features</a>, supporting
pointer and hover-related queries, has
landed</a> in WPE WebKit.</p>
When using the Wayland backend, this change exposes the current state of
pointing devices (mouse and touchscreen), dynamically reacting to changes such
as plugging or unplugging. When the new WPEPlatform API is not used, the
previous behaviour, defined at build time, is still used.</p>
  </div>
WPE Android ↗</a>  🤖</h3>

Adaptation of WPE WebKit targeting the Android operating system.</p>
</div>
  
A number of fixes have</a> been</a> merged</a> to fix and improve building WPE WebKit for Android. This is part of an ongoing effort to make it possible to build WPE-Android using upstream WebKit without needing additional patches.</p>
  </div>
  

The example MiniBrowser included with WPE-Android has been</a> fixed</a> to handle edge-to-edge layouts on Android 15.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #19
2025-03-31T19:58:04+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from March 24 to March 31.</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
ManagedMediaSource</a> was enabled</a> in WPE WebKit and WebKitGTK.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
The JSC jitless Wasm tests now work again on ARMv7</a>.</p>
  </div>
  

Doing a 32-bit build on ARM64 hardware now works</a> with GCC 11.x as well.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
Landed a change</a> that improves the painting of tile fragments in the compositor if damage propagation is enabled and if the tiles sizes are bigger than 256x256. In those cases, less GPU is utilized when damage allows.</p>
  </div>
  

The GTK and WPE ports no longer use</a> DisplayList</code> to serialize the painting commands and replay them in worker threads, but SkPictureRecorder</code>/SkPicture</code> from Skia. Some parts of the WebCore painting system, especially font rendering, are not thread-safe yet, and our current cross-thread use of DisplayList</code> makes it harder to improve the current architecture without breaking GTK and WPE ports. This motivated the search for an alternative implementation.</p>
  </div>
Community & Events 🤝</h2>
  
Sysprof is now able to filter samples by marks. This allows for statistically relevant data on what's running when a specific mark is ongoing, and as a consequence, allows for better data analysis. You can read more here</a>.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #18
2025-03-24T19:50:35+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from March 17 to March 24.</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
Limited</a> the amount data stored for certain elements of WebKitWebViewSessionState</code>. This results in memory savings, and avoids oddly large objects which resulted in web view state being restored slowly.</p>
  </div>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
Reduced parsing overhead in incoming WebRTC video streams by reducing excessive tag events at startup</a> and by avoiding the plugging of parser elements for already-parsed streams</a>.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
Fixed</a> an integer overflow when using wasm/gc on 32-bits.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
Landed a change</a> that fixes a few scenarios where the damage was not generated on layer property changes.</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
WebKitGTK 2.48.0</a> and WPE WebKit 2.48.0</a> have been released. While they may not look as exciting as the 2.46 series, which introduced the use of Skia for painting, they nevertheless includes half a year of improvements. This development cycle focused on reworking internals, which brings modest performance improvements for all kinds of devices, but most importantly cleanups which will enable further improvements going forward.</p>
For those who need longer to integrate newer releases, which we know can be a longer process for embedded device distrihytos, we have also published WPE WebKit 2.46.7</a> with a few stability and security fixes.</p>
Accompanying these releases there is security advisory WSA-2025-0002</code> (GTK</a>, WPE</a>), which covers the solved security issues. Crucially, all three contain the fix for an issue known to be exploited in the wild, and therefore we strongly encourage updating.</p>
As usual, bug reports are always welcome at the WebKit Bugzilla</a>.</p>
  </div>
  

libsoup 3.6.5</a> has been released with bug fixes and security improvements.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #17
2025-03-17T20:31:12+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from March 10 to March 17.</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
Web Platform 🌐</h3>
  
Updated</a> button activation behaviour and type property reflection with command</code> and commandfor</code>. Also aligned popovertarget</code> behaviour with latest specification.</p>
  </div>
  

Fixed</a> reflection of command IDL property.</p>
  </div>
  

Implemented</a> the trusted-types-eval</code> keyword for the script-src CSP directive.</p>
  </div>
  

Implemented</a> accessibility handling for command buttons.</p>
  </div>
  

Enabled</a> command</code> and commandfor</code> in preview.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
Fixed</a> an integer overflow in JSC (only happens on 32-bit systems with lots of RAM).</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
Fixed</a> theming</a> issues</a> in WPE/WebKitGTK with vertical writing-modes</a>.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #16
2025-03-10T22:59:27+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from March 3 to March 10.</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
Web Platform 🌐</h3>
  
Forced</a> styling to field-sizing: fixed</code> when an input element is auto filled, and added
support</a> for changing field-sizing</code>
dynamically.</p>
  

Fixed</a> an issue where the imperative
popover APIs didn't take into account the source</code> parameter for focus behavior.</p>
  </div>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
Fixed</a> YouTube breakage on videos with
advertisements. The fix prevents scrolling to the comments section when the
videos are fullscreened, but having working video playback was considered more
important for now.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
Fixed re-layout issues</a> for form
controls with the experimental field-sizing</code> implementation.</p>
  </div>
  

Landed a change</a> that improves
the quality of damage rectangles and reduces the amount of painting done in the
compositor in some simple scenarios.</p>
  </div>
  

Introduce</a> a hybrid threaded rendering
mode, scheduling tasks to both the CPU and GPU worker pools. By default we use
CPU-affine rendering on WPE, and GPU-affine rendering on the GTK port,
saturating the CPU/GPU worker pool first, before switching to the GPU/CPU.</p>
  </div>
Infrastructure 🏗️</h2>
  
We have recently enabled automatic nightly runs of WPT tests with WPE for the
Web Platform Tests (WPT) dashboard. If you click on the “Edit” button at the
wpt.fyi dashboard</a> now there is the option to select WPE.</p>
For example, one may compare the results for WPE to other browsers</a>
or examine the differences between the WPE and GTK ports</a>.</p>
These nightly runs happen now daily on the TaskCluster CI sponsored by Mozilla
(Thanks to James Graham</a>!).
If you want to run WPT tests with WPE WebKit locally, there are instructions
at the WPT documentation</a>.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #15
2025-03-03T14:15:37+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from February 19 to March 3.</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
Web Platform 🌐</h3>
  
Implemented</a>
support for setting returnValue</code> for <dialog></code> with Invoker
Commands</a>.</p>
  </div>
  

After fixing</a>
an issue with Trusted Types when doing attribute mutation within the default
callback, and implementing</a>
performance improvements for Trusted Types enforcement, the
Trusted Types</a>
implementation is now considered stable and has been
enabled by default</a>.</p>
  </div>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
Landed one fix</a> which,
along with previous patches, solved the webKitMediaSrcStreamFlush()</code> crash
reported in bug #260455</a>.</p>
Unfortunately, in some pages where the crash previously occurred, now a
different blank video bug has been revealed. The cause of this bug is known,
but fixing it would cause performance regressions in pages with many video
elements. Work is ongoing to find a better solution for both.</p>
The initial support of MP4-muxed WebVTT in-band text
tracks</a> is about to be merged,
which will bring this MSE feature to the ports using GStreamer. Text tracks
for the macOS port of WebKit only landed two weeks
ago</a> and we expect there will be
issues to iron out in WebKit ports, multiplatform code and even potentially in
spec work—we are already aware of a few potential ones.</p>
Note that out-of band text-tracks are well supported in MSE across browsers
and commonly used. On the other hand, no browsers currently ship with in-band
text track support in MSE at this point.</p>
  </div>
  

Support for MediaStreamTrack.configurationchange</code> events was
added</a>,
along with related
improvements</a>
in the GStreamer PipeWire plugin. This will allow WebRTC applications to
seamlessly handle default audio/video capture changes.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
Continued improving the support for handling graphics damage:</p>


Added support</a>
for validating damage rectangles in Layout Tests.</p>
</li>

Landed a change</a> that adds
layout tests covering the damage propagation feature.</p>
</li>

Landed a change</a> that fixes
damage rectangles on layer resize operations.</p>
</li>

Landed a change</a> that
improves damage rectangles produced by scrolling so that they are
clipped to the parent container.</p>
</div>

</li>
</ul>
The number of threads used for painting with the GPU has been slightly
tweaked</a>, which brings a measurable
performance improvement in all kinds of devices with four or mores processor
cores.</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
The stable branch</a>
for the upcoming 2.48.x stable release series of the GTK and WPE ports has
been created. The first preview releases from this branch are WebKitGTK
2.47.90</a> and
WPE WebKit 2.47.90</a>.
People willing to report issues and help with stabilization are encouraged to
test them and report issues in Bugzilla</a>.</p>
  </div>
Community & Events 🤝</h2>
  
Published a blog
post</a>
that presents an opinionated approach to the work with textual logs obtained
from WebKit and GStreamer.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #14
2025-02-18T11:34:03+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from February 11 to February 18.</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
Several multimedia-related optimizations landed this week, memory allocations were reduced in the video rendering code path</a> and in the MediaStreamAudioDestinationNode implementation</a>.</p>
  </div>
  

On the WebRTC fronts, the GstWebRTC backend has gained support for stats rate limiting support</a> and the send/receive buffer sizes were adjusted</a>.</p>
  </div>
  

The GStreamer video frame converter, used to show video frames in the canvas or
WebGL, has been fixed to use the right GL context and now supports DMA-BUF
video frames</a>, too.</p>
  </div>
  

Added support</a> to the eotf</code>
additional MIME type parameter when checking for supported multimedia content
types. This is required by some streaming sites like YouTube TV.</p>
  </div>
  

The GStreamer-based WebCodecs AudioData::copyTo()</code> is now spec compliant</a>, handling all possible format conversions defined in the WebCodecs specification.</p>
  </div>
Infrastructure 🏗️</h2>
  
The WebKit ports that use CMake as their build system—as is the case for the GTK and WPE ones—now enable C++ library assertions by default</a>, when building against GNU libstdc++</code> or LLVM's libc++</code>. This adds lightweight runtime checks to a number of C++ library facilities, mostly aimed at detecting out-of-bounds memory access, and does not have a measurable performance impact on typical browsing workloads.</p>
A number of Linux distributions were already enabling these assertions as part of their security hardening efforts (e.g. Fedora</a> or Gentoo</a>) and they do</em> help finding actual bugs. As a matter of fact, a number of issues were fixed before</em> all the WebKit API and layout tests with the assertions enabled and the patch could be merged! Going forward, this will prevent accidentally introducing bugs new due to wrong usage of the C++ standard library.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #13
2025-02-11T10:43:08+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from February 3 to February 11.</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
Fixed</a> an assertion crash in the
remote Web Inspector when its resources contain an UTF-8 “non-breaking space”
character.</p>
  </div>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
Media playback now supports</a> choosing the output audio device on a per element basis, using the setSinkId() API</a>. This also added the support needed for enumerating</a> audio outputs, which is needed by Web applications to obtain the identifiers of the available devices. Typical usage includes allowing the user to choose the audio output used in WebRTC-based conference calls.</p>
For now feature flags ExposeSpeakers</code>, ExposeSpeakersWithoutMicrophone</code>, and PerElementSpeakerSelection</code> need to be enabled for testing.</p>

  
  

    Video showing a screen capture of the WebKitGTK Minibrowser
    program choosing among different audio outputs.
  </p>
</video>
  </div>
  

Set proper playbin flags</a> which
are needed to properly use OpenMax on the RaspberryPi.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
Landed a change</a> that adds a
visualization for damage rectangles, controlled by the WEBKIT_SHOW_DAMAGE</code>
environment variable. This highlights areas damaged during rendering of every
frame—as long as damage propagation is enabled.</p>
</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
Stable releases of WebKitGTK 2.46.6</a> and WPE WebKit 2.46.6</a> are now available. These come along with the first security advisory of the year (WSA-2025-0001: GTK</a>, WPE</a>): they contain mainly security fixes, and everybody is advised to update.</p>
The unstable release train continues as well, with WebKitGTK 2.47.4</a> and WPE WebKit 2.47.4</a> available for testing. These are snapshots of the current development status, and while expected to work there may be rough edges—if you encounter any issue, reports at the WebKit Bugzilla</a> are always welcome.</p>
  </div>
  

The recently released libwpe 1.16.1</a> accidentally introduced an ABI break, which has been corrected in libwpe 1.16.2</a>. There are no other changes, and the latter should be preferred.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #12
2025-02-03T22:33:48+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from January 27 to February 3.</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
The documentation now has a section on how to use the Web Inspector
remotely</a>. This makes information on
this topic easier to find, as it was previously scattered around a few
different locations.</p>
  </div>
  

Jamie continues her Coding Experience work around bringing WebExtensions to the
WebKitGTK port. A good part of this involves porting
functionality</a>
from Objective-C, which only the Apple WebKit ports would use, into C++ code
that all ports may use. The latest in this saga was
WebExtensionStorageSQLiteStore</a>.</p>
  </div>
Web Platform 🌐</h3>
  
The experimental support for Invoker
Commands</a>
has been updated</a> to match latest
spec changes.</p>
  </div>
  

WPE and WebKitGTK now have
support</a>
for the Cookie Store
API</a>.</p>
  </div>
	

Implemented</a>
experimental support for the CloseWatcher API</a>.</p>
  </div>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to)
playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
The GStreamer WebRTC backend can now recycle inactive
senders</a>
and support for inactive receivers was also improved. With these changes,
support for screen sharing over WebRTC is now more reliable.</p>
  </div>
  

On the playback front, a bug on the silent video automatic pause optimization
was fixed</a>, the root case for certain
VP9 videos appearing as empty sometimes was found out to be in
GStreamer</a>,
and there is effort ongoing to solve racy crashes when flushing MSE
streams</a>.</p>
  </div>
WebKitGTK 🖥️</h2>
  
Support for WebDriver BiDi</a> has been
enabled in WebKitGTK</a> as an
experimental feature.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #11
2025-01-27T17:56:22+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from January 20 to January 27.</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
GLib 2.70 will be required starting with the upcoming 2.48 stable releases. This made it possible to remove some code</a> that is no longer needed.</p>
  </div>
  

Fixed</a> unlimited memory consumption in case of playing regular video playback and using web inspector.</p>
  </div>
  

Speed up</a> reading of large messages sent by the web inspector.</p>
  </div>
Web Platform 🌐</h3>
  
Implemented support</a> for dialog.requestClose()</code>.</p>
  </div>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
Fixed</a> the assertion error "pipeline and player states are not synchronized" related to muted video playback in the presence of scroll. Work is ongoing regarding other bugs reproduced with the same video, some of them related to scroll and some likely indepedent.</p>
  </div>
  

Fixed lost initial audio
samples</a> played using WebAudio on
32-bit Raspberry Pi devices, by preventing the OpenMAX subsystem to enter
standby mode.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
Landed a change</a> that fixes damage propagation of 3D-transformed layers.</p>
  </div>
  

Fixed a regression</a> visiting any web page making use of accelerated ImageBuffers (e.g. canvas) when CPU rendering is used. We were unconditionally creating OpenGL fences, even in CPU rendering mode, and tried to wait for completion in a worker thread, that had no OpenGL context (due to CPU rendering). This is an illegal operation in EGL and fired an assertion, crashing the WebProcess.</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
Despite the work on the WPE Platform API, we continue to maintain the “classic” stack based on libwpe. Thus, we have released libwpe 1.16.1</a> with the small—but important—addition of support for representing analog button inputs for devices capable of reporting varying amounts of pressure.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #10
2025-01-20T22:32:32+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from January 13 to January 20.</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
The JavaScriptCore GLib API has gained
support</a>
for creating
Promise</a>
objects. This allows integrating asynchronous functionality more ergonomically when
interfacing between native code and JavaScript.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
Elements with outlines inside scrolling containers
now</a> render their outlines
properly</a>.</p>
  </div>
  

Landed a change</a> that adds
multiple fixes to the damage propagation functionality in scenarios such as:</p>


Layers with custom transforms.</p>
</li>

Pages with custom viewport scale.</p>
</li>

Dynamic layer size changes.</p>
</li>

Scrollbar layers.</p>
</div>

</li>
</ul>
Landed a change</a> that improves
damage propagation in terms of animations handling.</p>
  </div>
  

Landed a change</a> that prevents
any kind of damage propagation when the feature is disabled at runtime using
its corresponding flag. Before that, even though the functionality was
runtime-disabled some memory usage and unneeded calculations were being done.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
WPE Platform API 🧩</h3>

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p>
</div>
  
Drag gesture threshold, and key repeat delay/interval are now handled through
the WPESettings API</a> instead of using
hardcoded values. While defaults typically work well, being able to tweak them
for certain setups without rebuilding WPE is a welcome addition.</p>
  </div>
  

Sylvia has also improved the WPE Platform DRM/KMS backend to pick the
default</a> output device scaling factor
using WPESettings</code>.</p>
  </div>
Infrastructure 🏗️</h2>
  
libsoup has been added</a> to
Google's OSS-Fuzz</a> program to help find
security issues.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #9
2025-01-13T13:36:47+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from December 31, 2024 to January 13, 2025.</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
Web Platform 🌐</h3>
  
Landed a fix</a> to the experimental Trusted Types implementation for certain event handler content attributes not being protected even though they are sinks.</p>
  </div>
  

Landed a
fix</a>
to experimental Trusted Types implementation where the
SVGScriptElement.className</code> property was being protected even though it's not
a sink.</p>
  </div>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
Support for the H.264 “constrained-high” and “high” profiles was
improved</a> in the GStreamer WebRTC
backend.</p>
  </div>
  

The GStreamer WebRTC backend now has basic support for network conditions
simulation</a>, that will be useful to
improve error recovery and packet loss coping mechanisms.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
JSC got a fix</a>
for a tricky garbage-collection issue.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
Landed a
change</a>
that enables testing the "damage propagation" functionality. This
is a first step in a series of fixes and improvements that should stabilize
that feature.</p>
Damage propagation passes extra information that describes the viewport areas
that have visually changed since the last frame across different graphics
subsystems. This allows the WebKit compositor and the system compositor to
reduce the amount of painting being done thus reducing usage of resources
(CPU, GPU, and memory bus). This is especially helpful on constrained,
embedded platforms.</p>
  </div>
WebKitGTK 🖥️</h2>
  
A patch</a> landed to add metadata
(title and creation/modification date) to PDF documents generated for
printing.</p>
  </div>
  

The “suspended” toplevel state is now handled in GTK
port</a> to pause rendering when web
views are fully obscured.</p>
  </div>
  

Jamie Murphy</a> is doing a Coding Experience</a> focused on adding support for WebExtensions</a>. After porting a number of Objective-C classes to C++, to allow using them in all WebKit ports, she has recently made the code build on Linux</a>, and started adding</a> new public API</a> to expose the functionality to GTK applications that embed web views. There is still plenty of work to do, but this is great progress nevertheless.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
  
Sylvia Li, who is also doing a Coding
Experience</a>, has updated
WPEView</a> so it will pick its default
configuration values using the recently added WPESettings
API</a>.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #8
2024-12-30T16:39:15+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from December 23 to December 30.</p>
Community & Events 🤝</h2>
  
Published an article</a> on CSS Anchor Positioning. It discusses the current status of the support across browsers, Igalia's contributions to the WebKit's implementation, and the predictions for the future.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #7
2024-12-23T16:03:47+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from December 16 to December 23.</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
Improved logging in WebDriver service executables</a>, using the same infrastructure as the browser (e.g. journald logging and different levels).</p>
  </div>
  

Added support for the first WebDriver-BiDi event in WebKit: monitoring console messages</a>.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
JavaScriptCore got a fix</a> for a wasm test that was flaky on 32-bits. We also submitted a new PR</a> to fix handling of Air (Air is an intermediate representation) Args with offsets that are not directly addressable in the O0 register allocator.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
Since the switch to Skia we have been closely following upstream changes, and making small contributions when needed. After adding support for OpenType-SVG fonts the build with Clang was broken, and needed a fix to allow building Skia in C++ 23 mode</a> (as we do in WebKit). The Skia update for this week</a> resulting in a fix to avoid SK_NO_SANITIZE("cfi")</code> when using GCC</a>.</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
Stable releases of WebKitGTK 2.46.5</a> and WPE WebKit 2.46.5</a> are now available. While they include some minor fixes, these are focused on patches for security issues, and come accompanied with a new security advisory (WSA-2024-0008: GTK</a>, WPE</a>). As usual, it is recommended to stay up to date, and fresh packages have been already making their way to mainstream Linux distributions.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #6
2024-12-16T13:33:33+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from December 9 to December 16.</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
Web Platform 🌐</h3>
  
Shipped</a> the X25519 algorithm of the WebCrypto API for the Mac, GTK+ and WPE ports.</p>
  </div>
  

Fixed corner</a> case invoker issue with popover inside invoker, matching the updated spec.</p>
  </div>
  

Form controls have long standing interoperability issues and <textarea></code> is no
exception. This patch</a>
fixes space being reserved for scrollbars despite overlay scrollbars being
enabled. This brings WebKit in line with Firefox's behaviour.</p>
  </div>
  

Implemented improvements to the popover
API</a>
to allow imperative invokers relationships, this brings the JavaScript APIs
inline with the declarative popovertarget</code> attribute.</p>
  </div>
  

Implemented the CanvasRenderingContext2D letterSpacing</code>/wordSpacing</code> support</a>.</p>
  </div>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
Due to on-going work on improving memory usage in WebRTC use-cases, several patches landed in WebKit (1</a>, 2</a>,3</a>) and GStreamer (4</a>). Another related task is under review in libnice</a>.</p>
  </div>
  

Several WebCodecs GStreamer backend fixes</a> landed, mostly related with Opus and LPCM decoding support.</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
JavaScriptCore now has Wasm tail call support on ARMv7</a>.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
OpenType color fonts with SVG outlines stopped working with the transition from Cairo to Skia</a>. This was unintentional, and support for this kind of fonts has been re-enabled for Skia</a>.</p>
Building the OpenType-SVG support required building Skia's SVG module, which uses Expat</a> as its XML parser. Packagers will need to add it as a build dependency, or configure the compilation passing -DUSE_SKIA_OPENTYPE_SVG=OFF</code>, which disables the feature.</p>
</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #5
2024-12-10T22:05:00+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from December 3 to December 10.</p>
Web Platform 🌐</h3>
  
Improved interoperability somewhat by including font-weight</code> in the
CanvasRenderingContext2D.font</code>
serialization</a>.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
Support for cross-thread transfer of accelerated ImageBitmap</code> objects
landed upstream</a> for the GTK
and WPE ports. It improves performance of applications that use worker
threads and pass accelerated ImageBitmap</code> objects (with ownership) around.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #4
2024-12-02T13:06:21+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from November 23 to December 2.</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
The documentation on GTK/WPE port profiling with Sysprof landed upstream</a>.</p>
  </div>
  

Support for anchor-center</code> alignment landed upstream</a> for all the WebKit ports. This is a part of cutting-edge CSS spec called CSS Anchor Positioning</a>. To test this feature, the CSSAnchorPositioning</code> runtime preference needs to be enabled.</p>
  </div>
Web Platform 🌐</h3>
  
WebKit has since a long time offered  a non-standard method
Document.caretRangeFromPoint()</code> to get the caret range at a certain
coordinate, but now offers the same functionality in a standardised way</a>.</p>
  </div>
  

We improved the multi touch support on WPE</a>: the touch identifiers are now more reliable when using the Web API Pointer Events. This has been backported to the last stable release 2.46.4</p>
  </div>
JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3>

The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p>
</div>
  
On the JSC front, Justin Michaud has fixed a tricky
issue</a> in the implementation of
Air shuffles (i.e. smartly copying N arbitrary locations to N different
arbitrary locations). He also
fixed</a> some lowering code that
generated invalid B3, as well as the 32-bit version of
addI31Ref</a> (part of the GC
wasm extension).</p>
Angelos Oikonomopoulos
fixed</a> another corner case in
the testing of single-precision floating point arguments on 32-bits.</p>
  </div>
Graphics 🖼️</h3>
  
Support for multi-threaded GPU rendering landed
upstream</a> for both GTK/WPE ports. In
main</code> branch, GPU accelerated tile rendering was already activated by
default—it is still the case, but now it utilizes one extra GPU rendering
thread instead of performing the GPU rendering using (and blocking) the main
thread.</p>
The number of threads used for CPU multi-threaded rendering was controlled
by the WEBKIT_SKIA_PAINTING_THREADS</code> environment variable and has been
renamed to WEBKIT_SKIA_CPU_PAINTING_THREADS</code>. Likewise we now support the
setting WEBKIT_SKIA_GPU_PAINTING_THREADS</code> (where 0</code> implies using the main
thread, and values in the 1</code> to 4</code> range enable threaded GPU rendering) to
control the amount of GPU rendering threads used.</p>
  </div>
  

Negotiation of buffer formats with Wayland using DMA-BUF feedback was
getting the first format that fits with the requirements in the first
tranche even when the transparency did not match. Now we honor the
transparency if there is a way to do
it</a>,
even when other tranches than the first one need to be used. This allows the
compositor to do direct scanout in more cases.</p>
  </div>
Releases 📦️</h2>
  
This has been a week filled with releases!</p>
On the stable series, WebKitGTK 2.46.4</a> and WPE WebKit 2.46.4</a> include the usual stream of small fixes, a number of multimedia handling improvements focused on around Media Stream, and two important security fixes covered in a new security advisory (WSA‑2024‑0007: GTK</a>, WPE</a>). The covered vulnerabilities are known to be exploited in the wild, and updating is strongly encouraged; fresh packages are already available (or will be soon) in popular Linux distributions.</p>
Also, development releases WebKitGTK 2.47.2</a> and WPE WebKit 2.47.2</a> are now available. The main highlights are the multi-threaded GPU rendering, and the added system settings API in WPEPlatform. These development snapshots are often timed around important changes; we greatly appreciate when people put the effort to give them a try, because detecting (and reporting) any issues earlier is a great help that gives us developers more time to polish the code before it reaches a stable version.</p>
  </div>
Infrastructure 🏗️</h2>
  
Flatpak 1.15.11 was released</a> with a handful of patches related to accessibility. These patches enable WebKit accessibility to work in sandboxed environments. With this release, all the pieces of this puzzle fell in place, and now sandboxed apps that use WebKit are properly accessible and introspectable by screen readers and Braille generators.</p>
Of course, there are further improvements to be made, and lots of fine-tuning to how WebKit handles accessibility of web pages. But this is nonetheless an exciting step, both for accessibility on Linux and also for the platform.</p>
  </div>
  

A WPE MiniBrowser runner for the Web-Platform-Tests (WPT) cross-browser test suite was added recently</a>. Please check the documentation on how to use it</a> and remember that there is also a WebKitGTK MiniBrowser runner there also available</a>. Both runners allow to automatically download and use the last nightly universal bundle for running the tests if you pass the flag --install-browser</code> to ./wpt run</code>. Pass also --log-mach=-</code> for increased verbosity. Please note that this only adds the runner for manual testing. We are still working on adding WPE to the automated testing dashboard at wpt.fyi</a></p>
  </div>
  

Justin Michaud submitted a fix</a> for flashing Yocto images to external SD cards.</p>
  </div>
  

The WPE WebKit web site now has a separate RSS feed for security advisories</a>. It can be reached at https://wpewebkit.org/security.xml</code> and may be useful for those interested in automated notifications about security fixes.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #3
2024-11-22T22:46:44+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from November 15 to November 22.</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
The getImageData()</a> canvas method has been optimized</a> to avoid an intermediate memory copy. This made fetching pixel data about ten times faster in the embedded hardware and laptops with integrated GPUs used for testing. The improvement is slated for inclusion in the upcoming 2.46.4 stable release.</p>
  </div>
  

The WebKit#31458</a> PR landed today. This adds a mechanism that leverages the damage information to reduce the amount of painting during composition. The biggest gains of that are expected with WPE used on embedded devices.</p>
  </div>
  

Running WebKit layout tests using the multi-threaded Skia-CPU mode (WEBKIT_SKIA_ENABLE_CPU_RENDERING=1</code>, WEBKIT_SKIA_PAINTING_THREADS>0</code>) fired assertions in debug/assert-enabled builds. Recording a DisplayList</a> on the main thread and replaying it on a worker thread exposed a thread-safety issue. The Pattern class</a> was not expecting to be dereferenced from a non-main thread. Pattern</code> now inherits from ThreadSafeRefCounted</code> to fix the problem</a>.</p>
</div>

Traditionally, we supported multi-threaded tile rendering using Cairo (which is CPU-only), and also using Skia in CPU rendering mode. Skia with GPU accelerated rendering is driven from the main thread and does not</em> support multi-threading. However, there is a non-negligible amount of CPU work to be performed prior to using the GPU for rendering, where it can be beneficial to parallelize that work across multiple cores.</p>
Preparation is ongoing for threaded GPU rendering, by adding GPU synchronization primitives</a> to NativeImage</a> and ImageBuffer</a> for Skia, and making use of the new GPU synchronization primitives</a> during DisplayList</a> recording (on the main thread) and replays—which will happen in a GPU worker thread, once we have added support for that.</p>
</div>
Multimedia 🎥</h3>

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p>
</div>
  
Canvas to PeerConnection streaming was fixed</a>, there was an issue with video orientation tags handling leading to flipped frames on receiving side.</p>
</p>
  </div>
  

Screen capture</a> support using PipeWire and GStreamer was fixed</a>, DMA-BUFs are now negotiated with PipeWire, enabling zero-copy rendering to video elements. Screen capture streaming to PeerConnection is still an open issue</a> though.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
WPE Platform API 🧩</h3>

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p>
</div>
  
WPEPlatform now supports</a> a Settings API</a> allowing platforms and applications to set options such as fonts or dark mode. This can be tested by launching MiniBrowser and passing an INI-style configuration file with settings:</p>
MiniBrowser</span> --use-wpe-platform-api --config-file=config.ini</span></span></code></pre>  </div>
WPE Android ↗</a>  🤖</h3>

Adaptation of WPE WebKit targeting the Android operating system.</p>
</div>
  
WPE-Android got updated</a> to</a> WebKit 2.46.3</a>. Coming from 2.46.0, it includes a fix for DuckDuckGo results link, better text kerning, a better performing Canvas putImageData()</code>operation, improved selection of H.264 encoding parameters, and more.</p>
As usual, the 0.1.2 release at GitHub</a> contains the downloadable .apk</code> packages. The Maven repository</a> has been updated as well.</p>
  </div>
  

Producing WPE-Android releases on GitHub has been automated</a>, and version 0.1.2 has already been made this way, the only manual intervention being the approval of the draft created by the CI setup.</p>
  </div>
Infrastructure 🏗️</h2>
  
GNOME Web Canary builds are working again, now based on the GNOME Flatpak runtime instead of the soon-to-be-deprecated WebKit Flatpak SDK runtime. To install it run:</p>
flatpak</span> --user install</span> \</span></span>
  https://nightly.gnome.org/repo/appstream/org.gnome.Epiphany.Canary.flatpakref</span></span></code></pre>
This version of GNOME Web leverages nightly WebKitGTK builds from the WebKit Git main</code> development branch.</p>
</p>
  </div>
  
The WebKitGTK Debian 11 bot</a> has been retired. We officially stopped supporting WebKitGTK on Debian 11 on June 12th (one year after the release of Debian 12), however we have been maintaining WebKitGTK on Debian 11 for a longer time than initially expected.  Debian 11 Security support reached end-of-life on August 14th, 2024.</p>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #2
2024-11-15T23:10:08+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from November 8 to November 15.</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
Sysprof received a round of improvements to the Marks Waterfall view, the
hover tooltip now show the duration of the
mark</a>. The
Graphics view also received some visual
improvements</a>,
such as taller graphs and line rendering without cutoffs. Finally, Sysprof
collector is now able to handle multiprocess scenarios
better</a>.</p>
A new tool for Sysprof was added: sysprof-cat</code>. It takes a capture file, and dumps it in textual form.</p>
This is all in preparation to further profiler integration in WebKit on
Linux. A new set of integration points is being prepared for WebKit where it
can, for example, report the page FPS and memory usage to Sysprof in the
Graphics view.</p>
</p>
  </div>
  

The JSCOnly port may be built with support for the GLib main loop when configured with cmake -DPORT=JSCOnly -DEVENT_LOOP_TYPE=GLib</code>. This is a seldom used option and the build was broken for months, but it has now been fixed</a>.</p>
  </div>
  

This week the team took some time to kickstart improvements to the documentation. One of the goals we have had in mind for long is adding pages to the manual on a number of topics, and in this vein Georges has added an overview page for WebKitGTK</a> and Alex started a page listing some of the available environment variables</a>.</p>
In order to allow sharing selected content between the GTK and WPE ports, Adrian is adding support to setup additional content directories for gi-docgen</a> and to process templates</a> to pick fragments of the source files depending on the port.</p>
Improving what we already have is important, and Lauro has clarified how WebKitWebView::is-controlled-by-automation works</a>.</p>
  </div>
Infrastructure 🏗️</h2>
  
We lately have been deploying nightly packaging
bots</a>, to provide
binaries ready to use for different projects.</p>
These bots run once per day and upload different built products that you can check below:</p>


GNOME Web Canary (built products</a>):</p>
This one is meant to build GNOME Web with the GNOME SDK to produce the Canary builds of Web.
Follow the progress at
the corresponding Web merge request</a>.</p>
</li>

WebKitGTK</a>
and WPE WebKit</a>
MiniBrowser/WebDriver universal bundles.</p>
These universal bundles should work on any Linux distribution and are
intended for running tests on third-party CI systems without having to
build WebKit. They include inside the tarball all the system libraries
and resources needed to run WebKit, from libc</code> up to the Mesa graphics
drivers without requiring the usage of containers (similar concept to
AppImage</a>). Currently these builds are used
to for the WPT tests at wpt.fyi</a>,
running on the Mozilla TaskCluster CI.</p>
</li>

JSC universal bundle (built products</a>.</p>
Same content as the other universal bundles, but only including the jsc</code> command line program.
This is currently used by jsvu</a> to easily allow developers to test the
latest version of JavaScriptCore.</p>
</li>
</ol>
  </div>

That’s all for this week!</p>
</div>


WebKit Igalia Periodical #1
2024-11-08T23:25:32+00:00
Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from November 1 to November 8.</p>
Cross-Port 🐱</h2>
  
The end-to-end latency slightly improved</a> in the GstWebRTC backend, as the latency from capture devices is now properly taken into account.</p>
  </div>
  

Georges has proposed a new feature for Linux ports of WebKit: support for a new category of profiling information called “counters”. Counters are useful to track information over time, for example, the FPS</abbr> of WebKit while showing a web page, or how much memory a web page is consuming during its display. The counters are integrated with Sysprof.</p>
This is another tool that developers and enthusiasts can use to help profile and improve the performance of WebKit on Linux. The FPS counter is added as a proof of concept. This is still under review</a>.
</p>
  </div>
  

The prefer-hardware</code> WebCodecs option for video decoders is no longer ignored</a>. It is used as a hint to attempt decoding with hardware-accelerated components. If that fails, the decoder falls back to software.</p>
  </div>
  

On the JSC</abbr> ARMv7 front, work on enabling OMG, the highest WebAssembly optimizing JIT tier, is ongoing. Max Rottenkolber has added support</a> for atomics. Justin Michaud has synced up</a> the tail call code with 64-bits and submitted PRs to further sync</a> the 64/32-bit OMG generators. Most importantly, he's been working on an OSR fix</a> (On Stack Replacement, the ability for the VM to tier up to an optimizing tier even in the middle of a loop, which is vital for taking advantage of the optimized code). Angelos Oikonomopoulos has been going over corner cases in the B3 (the intermediate representation used by OMG) tests and submitting numerous fixes.</p>
  </div>
  

The minimum required ICU version is now 70.1. This change</a> updates ICU version checked by CMake to reflect a change that had already been done in 284568@main</a>, which rebaselined JavaScriptCore to ICU 70. By updating the version checks the build will fail as early as possible in case the required ICU version is not installed. In addition to ICU, the minimum versions of Harfbuzz and LibXML were updated too. These two libraries depend on ICU.</p>
  </div>
  

Philip fixed</a> the --enable-write-console-messages-to-stdout</code> setting so that it works inside AudioWorklet</a> environments; previously it would have been ignored.</p>
  </div>
  

The MediaRecorder</a> backend gained</a> WebM support (which requires GStreamer 1.24.9 or newer), and audio bitrate configuration support.</p>
  </div>
WebKitGTK 🖥️</h2>
  
The GTK port of the MiniBrowser now uses the GtkGraphicsOffload widget</a> when built with a modern GTK4 version. This allows GTK and the compositor to optimize the web view contents, potentially direct scanout it, or maybe put it in a monitor overlay plane as well. This should lead to less power consumption. This is an “invisible” improvement, meaning users won't be able to notice this.</p>
  </div>
WPE WebKit 📟</h2>
  
The WPE WebKit 2.47.1 development release is now available</a>. This is the first preview release for the upcoming stable series, and includes a few new features like support for the Spiel speech synthesis library</a>, improvements to DMA-BUF usage in WebGL and video decoding, and the WPEPlatform API has gotten some new features and improvements.</p>
As usual, feedback for development releases is welcome, including issue reports on Bugzilla</a>.</p>
  </div>
WPE Platform API 🧩</h3>

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p>
  </div>
  
Carlos Garcia added</a> basic touch input support to WPEPlatform DRM plug-in.</p>
  </div>
Community & Events 🤝</h2>
  
Mario published an article based on the talk delivered at the WebKit Contributors meeting on October 22nd, summarizing the work on WebKit done at Igalia in the past twelve months: Igalia and WebKit: status update and plans</a>.</p>
The original slides are also available</a>.</p>
  </div>
  

That’s all for this week!</p>
  </div>
Igalia WebKit Team

WebKit Igalia Periodical #59

Multimedia 🎥</h3> GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p> </div>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #58

Cross-Port 🐱</h2>

Multimedia 🎥</h3> GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p> </div>

WPE WebKit 📟</h2> WPE Platform API 🧩</h3> New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p> </div>

WPE Platform API 🧩</h3> New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p> </div>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #57

Multimedia 🎥</h3> GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p> </div>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #56

Cross-Port 🐱</h2>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #55

Cross-Port 🐱</h2>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #54

WPE Platform API 🧩</h3> New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p> </div>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #53

JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3> The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p> </div>

WPE Platform API 🧩</h3> New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p> </div>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #52

WPE WebKit 📟</h2> WPE Platform API 🧩</h3> New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p> </div>

WPE Platform API 🧩</h3> New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p> </div>

WPE Android ↗</a> 🤖</h3> Adaptation of WPE WebKit targeting the Android operating system.</p> </div>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #51

JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3> The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p> </div>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #50

Cross-Port 🐱</h2>

JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3> The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p> </div>

WPE WebKit 📟</h2> WPE Platform API 🧩</h3> New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p> </div>

WPE Platform API 🧩</h3> New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p> </div>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #49

Cross-Port 🐱</h2>

Multimedia 🎥</h3> GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p> </div>

JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3> The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p> </div>

WPE Platform API 🧩</h3> New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p> </div>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #48

JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3> The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p> </div>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #47

WebKit Igalia Periodical #46

Multimedia 🎥</h3> GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p> </div>

JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3> The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p> </div>

WPE WebKit 📟</h2> WPE Android ↗</a> 🤖</h3> Adaptation of WPE WebKit targeting the Android operating system.</p> </div>

WPE Android ↗</a> 🤖</h3> Adaptation of WPE WebKit targeting the Android operating system.</p> </div>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #45

WebKit Igalia Periodical #44

WPE WebKit 📟</h2> WPE Platform API 🧩</h3> New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p> </div>

WPE Platform API 🧩</h3> New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p> </div>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #43

WebKit Igalia Periodical #42

Cross-Port 🐱</h2>

Multimedia 🎥</h3> GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p> </div>

JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3> The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p> </div>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #41

Multimedia 🎥</h3> GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p> </div>

JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3> The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p> </div>

WPE WebKit 📟</h2> WPE Platform API 🧩</h3> New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p> </div>

WPE Platform API 🧩</h3> New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p> </div>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #40

WPE WebKit 📟</h2> WPE Platform API 🧩</h3> New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p> </div>

WPE Platform API 🧩</h3> New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p> </div>

WPE Android ↗</a> 🤖</h3> Adaptation of WPE WebKit targeting the Android operating system.</p> </div>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #39

Multimedia 🎥</h3> GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p> </div>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #38

JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3> The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p> </div>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #37

JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3> The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p> </div>

Community & Events 🤝</h2> Sysprof has received a variety of new features, improvements, and bugfixes, as part of the integration with Webkit. We continued pushing this front in the past 6 months! A few highlights:</p>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #36

Multimedia 🎥</h3> GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p> </div>

WPE WebKit 📟</h2> WPE Platform API 🧩</h3> New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p> </div>

WPE Platform API 🧩</h3> New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p> </div>

WPE Android ↗</a> 🤖</h3> Adaptation of WPE WebKit targeting the Android operating system.</p> </div>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #35

WebKit Igalia Periodical #34

Multimedia 🎥</h3> GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.</p> </div>

JavaScriptCore 🐟</h3> The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.</p> </div>

WPE WebKit 📟</h2> Fixed minor bug in WPE's: pressing Esc key inside a dialog closes dialog. See PR #49265</a>.</p> </div> WPE Platform API 🧩</h3> New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p> </div>

WPE Platform API 🧩</h3> New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.</p> </div>

WebKit Igalia Periodical #33
