WebKit2 MiniBrowser for the GTK+ port running!

After some months of cleaning, fixing and landing all the required patches (some provided by Motorola devs), yesterday we landed the last one adding the shared memory support, so you can safely download and compile WebKit2 with GTK+ using the trunk of the WebKit svn. Just add –enable-webkit2 to the compilation configuration of your choice and you’ll get a small MiniBrowser implemented with WebKit2 C API.

Basic feature of this new API is that it uses a split process architecture, the UI is separated from the web content in a different process. It means a lot of pros and some cons, currently at Igalia we are ready to face the cons so we can get all the pros, creating more stable and responsive applications using the port. Our plan is to add the complete support and make Epiphany work with it at some point.

We are also adding WebKitTestRunner support which will help a lot with the development. Besides the C API we are implementing a GTK+ friendly API, basically we are using the WebKit1 API over the WebKit2 C API, so you can even test it with the GtkLauncher and your own GNOME application easily.

Of course we are not going to forget about all the gardening work we are doing, maintaining, releasing and improving the core GTK+ port.

The code and APIs are still development status, there is still a lot of work to do, so just use them for testing purposes, this is just the initial step and we hope after this a lot of people can contribute to make the port rock even more.