Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from July 14 to July 21.
In this week we had a fix for the libsoup-based resource loader on platforms without the shared-mime-info package installed, a fix for SQLite usage in WebKit, ongoing work on the GStreamer-based WebRTC implementation including better encryption for its default DTLS certificate and removal of a dependency, and an update on the status of GNOME Web Canary version.
Cross-Port 🐱
ResourceLoader delegates local resource loading (e.g. gresources) to ResourceLoaderSoup, which in turn uses g_content_type_guess to identify their content type. In platforms where shared-mime-info is not available, this fails silently and reports "text/plain", breaking things such as PDFjs.
A patch was submitted to use MIMETypeRegistry to get the MIME type of these local resources, falling back to g_content_type_guess when that fails, making internal resource loading more resilient.
Fixed "PRAGMA incrementalVacuum" for SQLite, which is used to reclaim freed filesystem space.
Multimedia 🎥
GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.
Most web engines migrated from a default DTLS certificate signed with a RSA key to a ECDSA p-256 key, almost a decade ago. GstWebRTC is now also signing its default DTLS certificate with that private key format. This improves compatibility with various SFUs, the Jitsi Video Bridge among them.
Work is on-going in GStreamer, adding support for getting the currently selected ICE candidates pair and a new webrtcbin signal to close the connection.
The WebKit GStreamer MediaRecorder backend no longer depends on GstTranscoder
WPE WebKit 📟
WPE Android ↗ 🤖
Adaptation of WPE WebKit targeting the Android operating system.
Changed libpsl to include built-in public-suffix data when building WPE for Android. Among other duties, having this working correctly is important for site isolation, resource loading, and cookie handling.
Releases 📦️
The GNOME Web Canary build has been stale for several weeks, since the GNOME nightly SDK was updated to freedesktop SDK 25.08beta which no longer ships one of the WebKitGTK build dependencies (Ruby). We will do our best to get the builds back to a working state, soon hopefully.
That’s all for this week!
