WebKit Igalia Periodical #52

Landed support for font-size: math. Now math-depth can automatically control the font size inside of <math> blocks, making scripts and nested content smaller to improve readability and presentation.

Two new functions have been added to the public API:

• webkit_context_menu_item_get_gaction_target() to obtain the GVariant associated with a context menu item created from a GAction.

• webkit_context_menu_item_get_title() may be used to obtain the title of a context menu item.

Improved timers, by making some of them use the timerfd API. This reduces timer “lateness”—the amount of time elapsed between the configured trigger time, and the effective one—, which in turn improves the perceived smoothness of animations thanks to steadier frame delivery timings. Systems where the timerfd_create and timerfd_settime functions are not available will continue working as before.

On the WebXR front, support was added for XR_TRACKABLE_TYPE_DEPTH_ANDROID through the XR_ANDROID_trackables extension, which allows reporting depth information for elements that take part in hit testing.

Landed a change that implements non-composited page rendering in the WPE port. This new mode is disabled by default, and may be activated by disabling the AcceleratedCompositing runtime preference. In such case, the frames are rendered using a simplified code path that does not involve the internal WebKit compositor. Therefore it may offer a better performance in some specific cases on constrained embedded devices.

Since version 2.10.2, the FreeType library can be built with direct support for loading fonts in the WOFF2 format. Until now, the WPE and GTK WebKit ports used libwoff2 in an intermediate step to convert those fonts on-the-fly before handing them to FreeType for rendering. The CMake build system will now detect when FreeType supports WOFF2 directly and skip the conversion step. This way, in systems which provide a suitable version of FreeType, libwoff2 will no longer be needed.

The legacy libwpe-based API can now be disabled at build time, by toggling the ENABLE_WPE_LEGACY_API CMake option. This allows removal of uneeded code when an application is exclusively using the new WPEPlatform API.

AHardwareBuffer is now supported as backing for accelerated graphics surfaces that can be shared across processes. This is the last piece of the puzzle to use WPEPlatform on Android without involving expensive operations to copy rendered frames back-and-forth between GPU and system memory.

WebKitGTK 2.50.4 and WPE WebKit 2.50.4 have been released. These stable releases include a number of important patches for security issues, and we urge users and distributors to update to this release if they have not yet done it. An accompanying security advisory, WSA-2025-0010, has been published (GTK, WPE).

Development releases of WebKitGTK 2.51.4 and WPE WebKit 2.51.4 are available as well, and may be used to preview upcoming features. As usual, bug reports are welcome in Bugzilla.

Paweł Lampe has published a blog post that discusses various pre-rendering techniques useful in the context of using WPE on embedded devices.