Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from August 25 to September 1.
The rewrite of the WebXR support continues, as do improvements when building for Android, along with smaller fixes in multimedia and standards compliance.
Cross-Port 🐱
The WebXR implementation has gained input through OpenXR, including support for the hand interaction—useful for devices which only support hand-tracking—and the generic simple profile. This was soon followed by the addition of support for the Hand Input module.
Aligned the SVGStyleElement
type and media attributes with HTMLStyleElement's.
Multimedia 🎥
GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.
Support for FFMpeg GStreamer audio decoders was re-introduced because the alternative decoders making use of FDK-AAC might not be available in some distributions and Flatpak runtimes.
Graphics 🖼️
Usage of fences has been introduced to control frame submission of rendered WebXR content when using OpenXR. This approach avoids blocking in the renderer process waiting for frames to be completed, resulting in slightly increased performance.
Loading a font from a collection will now iterate until finding the correct one. This solved a few font rendering issues.
WPE WebKit 📟
WPE Platform API 🧩
New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.
Changed WPEPlatform to be built as part of the libWPEWebKit
library. This avoids duplicating some
code in different libraries, brings in a small reduction in used space, and
simplifies installation for packagers. Note that the wpe-platform-2.0 module
is still provided, and applications that consume the WPEPlatform API must still
check and use it.
WPE Android ↗ 🤖
Adaptation of WPE WebKit targeting the Android operating system.
Support for sharing AHardwareBuffer handles across processes is now
available. This lays out the
foundation to use graphics memory directly across different WebKit subsystems
later on, making some code paths more efficient, and paves the way towards
enabling the WPEPlatform API on Android.
The MediaSession API has been disabled when building for Android. The existing implementation would attempt to use the MPRIS D-Bus interface, which does not work on Android.
That’s all for this week!
