Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from May 5 to May 12.
This week saw one more feature enabled by default, additional support to track memory allocations, continued work on multimedia and WebAssembly.
Cross-Port 🐱
The Media Capabilities API is now enabled by default. It was previously available as a run-time option in the WPE/WebKitGTK API (WebKitSettings:enable-media-capabilities), so this is just a default tweak.
Landed a change that integrates malloc heap breakdown functionality with non-Apple ports. It works similarly to Apple's one 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.
Multimedia 🎥
GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.
Support for WebRTC RTP header extensions was improved, a RTP header extension for video orientation metadata handling was introduced and several simulcast tests are now passing
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.
JavaScriptCore 🐟
The built-in JavaScript/ECMAScript engine for WebKit, also known as JSC or SquirrelFish.
The in-place Wasm interpreter (IPInt) port to 32-bits has seen some more work.
Releases 📦️
Michael Catanzaro has published a writeup on his blog about how the WebKitGTK API versions have changed over time.
Infrastructure 🏗️
Landed some improvements in the WebKit container SDK for Linux, particularly in error handling.
That’s all for this week!
