Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from October 21 to October 28.
This week has again seen a spike in activity related to WebXR and graphics performance improvements. Additionally, we got in some MathML additions, a fix for hue interpolation, a fix for WebDriver screenshots, development releases, and a blog post about memory profiling.
Cross-Port 🐱
Support for WebXR Layers has seen the very first changes needed to have them working on WebKit. This is expected to take time to complete, but should bring improvements in performance, rendering quality, latency, and power consumption down the road.
Work has started on the WebXR Hit Test Module, which will allow WebXR experiences to check for real world surfaces. The JavaScript API bindings were added, followed by an initial XRRay implementation. More work is needed to actually provide data from device sensors.
Now that the WebXR implementation used for the GTK and WPE ports is closer to the Cocoa ones, it was possible to unify the code used to handle opaque buffers.
Implemented the text-transform: math-auto CSS property, which replaces the legacy mathvariant system and is
used to make identifiers italic in MathML Core.
Implemented the math-depth CSS
extension from MathML Core.
Graphics 🖼️
The hue interpolation method for gradients has been fixed. This is expected to be part of the upcoming 2.50.2 stable release.
Usage of Multi-Sample Antialiasing (MSAA) has been enabled when using GPU rendering, and then further changed to use dynamic MSAA to improve performance.
Paths that contain a single arc, oval, or line have been changed to use a specialized code path, resulting in improved performance.
WebGL content rendering will be handled by a new isolated process (dubbed “GPU Process”) by default. This is the first step towards moving more graphics processing out of the process that handles processing Web content (the “Web Process”), which will result in increased resilience against buggy graphics drivers and certain kinds of malicious content.
The internal webkit://gpu page has been
improved to also display information
about the graphics configuration used in the rendering process.
WPE WebKit 📟
WPE Platform API 🧩
New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.
The new WPE Platform, when using Skia (the default), now takes WebDriver screenshots in the UI Process, using the final assembled frame that was sent to the system compositor. This fixes the issues of some operations like 3D CSS animations that were not correctly captured in screenshots.
Releases 📦️
The first development releases for the current development cycle have been published: WebKitGTK 2.51.1 and WPE WebKit 2.51.1. These are intended to let third parties test upcoming features and improvements and as such bug reports for those are particularly welcome in Bugzilla. We are particularly interested in reports related to WebGL, now that it is handled in an isolated process.
Community & Events 🤝
Paweł Lampe has published a blog post that discusses GTK/WPE WebKit memory profiling using industry-standard tools and a built-in "Malloc Heap Breakdown" WebKit feature.
That’s all for this week!
