Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from September 22 to September 29.
Many news this week! We've got a performance improvement in the Vector implementation, a fix that makes a SVG attribute work similarly to HTML, and further advancements on WebExtension support. We also saw an update to WPE Android, the test infrastructure can now run WebXR tests, WebXR support in WPE Android, and a rather comprehensive blog post about the performance considerations of WPE WebKit with regards to the DOM tree.
Cross-Port 🐱
Vector copies performance was improved across the board, and specially for MSE use-cases
Fixed SVG <a> rel attribute to work the same as HTML <a>'s.
Work on WebExtension support continues with more Objective-C converted to C++, which allows all WebKit ports to reuse the same utility code in all ports.
Added handling of the visibilityState value for inline WebXR sessions.
Graphics 🖼️
WPE now supports importing pixels from non-linear DMABuf formats since commit 300687@main. This will help the work to make WPE take screenshots from the UIProcess (WIP) instead of from the WebProcess, so they match better what's actually shown on the screen.
Added support for the WebXR passthroughFullyObscured rendering hint when using the OpenXR backend.
WPE WebKit 📟
WPE Platform API 🧩
New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.
The build system will now compile WPEPlatform with warning-as-errors in developer builds. This helps catch potential programming errors earlier.
WPE Android ↗ 🤖
Adaptation of WPE WebKit targeting the Android operating system.
WPE-Android is being updated to use WPE WebKit 2.50.0. As usual, the ready-to-use packages will arrive in a few days to the Maven Central repository.
Added support to run WebXR content on Android, by using AHarwareBuffer to share graphics buffers between the main process and the content rendering process. This required coordination to make the WPE-Android runtime glue expose the current JavaVM and Activity in a way that WebKit could then use to initialize the OpenXR platform bindings.
Community & Events 🤝
Paweł Lampe has published in his blog the first post in a series about different aspects of Web engines that affect performance, with a focus on WPE WebKit and interesting comparisons between desktop-class hardware and embedded devices. This first article analyzes how “idle” nodes in the DOM tree render measurable effects on performance (pun intended).
Infrastructure 🏗️
The test infrastructure can now run API tests that need WebXR support, by using a dummy OpenXR compositor provided by the Monado runtime, along with the first tests and an additional one that make use of this.
That’s all for this week!
