With a bit of delay but we have finally released a new stable version of WebKitGTK+. This is the first stable release after the major 2.0 release. It mainly contains a lot of bug fixes and a few important new futures and API additions.
New Web Inspector
WebKitGTK+ now uses the new Web Inspector recently opensourced and upstreamed by Apple. We took advantage of the migration to improve the way inspector resources are distributed by compiling them in the WebKitGTK+ library as GResources. This means that resources are now always available without having to run make install or set environment variables.
Initial Wayland support
WebKitGTK+ 2.2 can be built with Wayland target if it’s available (it requires GTK+ 3.10 compiled with Wayland support). Not everything is fully supported yet, but the WebKit layout tests can be run under the Weston compositor and WebGL content works under Wayland displays too. There’s more detailed information in Žan Doberšek’s blog.
Video accelerated compositing support
When accelerated compositing is enabled, the GStreamer media player can play videos using OpenGL. You can find more details in Víctor’s blog.
Custom JavaScript injection
This was one of the major regressions in WebKit2GTK+ compared to the WebKit1 API. WebKitGTK+ 2.2 now allows to inject custom JavaScript code using the JavaScriptCore C API from a WebKit Web Process Extension. New API has been added to also allow running specific JavaScript code in isolated worlds. You can find examples about how to use this API and how to write Web Process Extensions in general in this post.
Improved accessibility support in WebKit2
Accessibility support in WebKit2 has been reworked to not depend on pango and gail, which resulted in several bugs fixed and a much better accessibility support. Check Mario’s blog for all the details.
New API
WebKitAuthenticationRequest: This is a new object used by the newWebKitWebView::authenticatesignal, that allows to implement a custom authentication mechanism (instead of the embedded dialog used by default) or simply disable HTTPS authentication entirely.WebKitScriptWorld: Used to inject custom JavaScript code in the main world, but also to create isolated worlds.webkit_uri_scheme_request_finish_error(): This new method makes it possible to finish a load of a custom URI scheme request with an error.- New
WebKitSettings: enable-accelerated-2d-canvas and enable-write-console-messages-to-stdout.
Qt recently announced that they are planning to switch from WebKit to Chromium (probably Blink and V8): http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2013/09/12/introducing-the-qt-webengine/ . Will this have consequences for WebKitGTK?
@malaclypse
I hope not. Qt integration of Chromium is horrible. For example it cannot use native scrollbars.
@malaclypse
Well, it’s true that in WebKit2 Qt, EFL and GTK+ ports share more code, so there’s been more cooperation between ports, and all WebKit ports contribute to WebCore in some way, but in general I don’t think it will have a huge impact for WebKitGTK+.
What about sandboxing and crash control?
Sandboxing is still in our RoadMap and there’s already a patch in WebKit bugzilla (See https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=110014), so hopefully it will be finished for 2.4. Regarding crash control, we already support it, there’s a signal emitted when the web process crashes, and then you can just start a new load and a new web process is spawned automatically.
@Kurt Kugel
They dont even ship the chromium port yet?
I created a minimal WebExtension in vala. (Only the initialize method is called). Now it seems that all the classes for WebExtensions like WebPage / WebFrame are not exposed through GObjectIntrospection. Is there a way to programm a WebExtension in vala?
@Marcel
hmm, good point, it seems we are not generating introspection for the extensions API. Could you please file a bug report in bugs.webkit.org?
@carlos garcia campos
I created the bug-report: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=122407
But I’m still wondering if its possible to create an extension in vala, even with the introspection available.
It seems that vala is doing some magic with method names to get the OO mechanics working but webkit expects a certain function name (webkit_web_extension_initialize) to be present.
@Marcel
As long as you can provide a shared library containing webkit_web_extension_initialize as a public symbol. I don’t know vala enough, so I don’t know. Can’t you write the entry point in C and the rest in vala? Everything will be C in the end once the vala code is compiled into GObject.
@carlos garcia campos
This could be an idea. Thanks for sharing 🙂