Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from March 17 to March 24.
Cross-Port 🐱
Limited the amount data stored for certain elements of WebKitWebViewSessionState. This results in memory savings, and avoids oddly large objects which resulted in web view state being restored slowly.
Multimedia 🎥
GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.
Reduced parsing overhead in incoming WebRTC video streams by reducing excessive tag events at startup and by avoiding the plugging of parser elements for already-parsed streams.
JavaScriptCore 🐟
The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.
Fixed an integer overflow when using wasm/gc on 32-bits.
Graphics 🖼️
Landed a change that fixes a few scenarios where the damage was not generated on layer property changes.
Releases 📦️
WebKitGTK 2.48.0 and WPE WebKit 2.48.0 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.
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 with a few stability and security fixes.
Accompanying these releases there is security advisory WSA-2025-0002 (GTK, WPE), 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.
As usual, bug reports are always welcome at the WebKit Bugzilla.
libsoup 3.6.5 has been released with bug fixes and security improvements.
That’s all for this week!
