Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from March 10 to March 18.
The big ticket item in this week's update are the 2.52.0 releases, which include the work from the last six-month development period, and come with a security advisory. Meanwhile, WPE-Android also gets a release, and a number of featured blog posts.
WPE WebKit 📟
Last week we added support to WPE
MiniBrowser to load settings from a key file. This extended the existing
--config-file=FILE feature, which previously only loaded WPEPlatform
settings under the [wpe-platform] group. Now the feature uses
webkit_settings_apply_from_key_file()
to load properties such as user-agent or enable-developer-extras
from the [websettings] group as well.
Releases 📦️
WebKitGTK 2.52.0 and WPE WebKit 2.52.0 are now available. These include the results of the effort made by the team during the last six months, including rendering improvements and performance optimizations, better security for WebRTC, a more complete WebXR implementation, and a second preview of the WPEPlatform API for the WPE port—among many other changes.
More information about the changes and improvements brought by these major releases can be found at the blog post about WebKitGTK 2.52, and the corresponding one for WPE WebKit 2.52.
Accompanying these releases there is security advisory WSA-2026-0001
(GTK,
WPE), with information
about solved security issues. As usual, we encourage everybody to use the most
recent versions where such issues are known to be fixed.
Bug reports are always welcome at the WebKit Bugzilla.
WPE Android 0.3.3 has been released, and prebuilt packages are available at the Maven Central repository. This is a maintenance release which updates the included WPE WebKit version to 2.50.6 and libsoup to 3.6.6, both of which include security fixes.
Community & Events 🤝
Kate Lee wrote a very interesting blog post showing how to create a small application using the WPEPlatform API to demonstrate one of its newly available features: the Context Menu API. It is rendered entirely as an HTML overlay, enabling richer and more portable context menu implementations.
WebXR support for WebKitGTK and WPE has been reworked and aligned with the modern multi-process architecture, using OpenXR to enable XR device integration on Linux and Android. Sergio Villar wrote a blog post that explains all the work done in the last months around it.
That’s all for this week!
