WebKit Igalia Periodical #1

The end-to-end latency slightly improved in the GstWebRTC backend, as the latency from capture devices is now properly taken into account.

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 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.

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.

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

On the JSC ARMv7 front, work on enabling OMG, the highest WebAssembly optimizing JIT tier, is ongoing. Max Rottenkolber has added support for atomics. Justin Michaud has synced up the tail call code with 64-bits and submitted PRs to further sync the 64/32-bit OMG generators. Most importantly, he's been working on an OSR fix (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.

The minimum required ICU version is now 70.1. This change updates ICU version checked by CMake to reflect a change that had already been done in 284568@main, 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.

Philip fixed the --enable-write-console-messages-to-stdout setting so that it works inside AudioWorklet environments; previously it would have been ignored.

The MediaRecorder backend gained WebM support (which requires GStreamer 1.24.9 or newer), and audio bitrate configuration support.

The GTK port of the MiniBrowser now uses the GtkGraphicsOffload widget 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.

The WPE WebKit 2.47.1 development release is now available. 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, improvements to DMA-BUF usage in WebGL and video decoding, and the WPEPlatform API has gotten some new features and improvements.

As usual, feedback for development releases is welcome, including issue reports on Bugzilla.

Carlos Garcia added basic touch input support to WPEPlatform DRM plug-in.

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.

The original slides are also available.