Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from March 23 to March 30.
This week comes with a mixed bag of new features, incremental improvements, and a new release with the ever important security issue fixes. Also: more blog posts!
Cross-Port 🐱
Implemented initial support for
closedby=any on dialog elements, which adds light dismiss behaviour. This is
behind the ClosedbyAttributeEnabled feature flag.
Added the remaining values for the
experimental closedby attribute implementation.
MiniBrowser now has a
--profile-dir=DIR command line option that can be used to specify a custom
directory where website data and cache can be stored, to test, for example,
behavior in a clean session.
Multimedia 🎥
GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.
Video decoding limits had been enforced on HTMLMediaElement.canPlayType() so
far, but they are now also enforced in MediaCapabilities
queries.
Graphics 🖼️
Fixed several OpenGL state
restoration bugs in BitmapTexture . These could cause a mismatch between the
GL state assumed by Skia and the actual one, leading to rendering artifacts
with certain GPU drivers and configurations.
The SKIA_DEBUG CMake option has been
enabled for Debug builds, enabling
Skia's internal assertions, debug logging, and consistency checks (e.g. bounds
checking, resource key diagnostics). It remains off by default for Release
and RelWithDebInfo builds, and can still be explicitly configured via
-DSKIA_DEBUG=ON|OFF.
WPE WebKit 📟
WPE Platform API 🧩
New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.
The new WPE_SETTING_OVERLAY_SCROLLBARS setting is now
available, and disabling it will use a
more traditional, always visible scrollbar style.
Releases 📦️
A new USE_GSTREAMER build option may now be
used to toggle the features that
require GStreamer at once. This can be used to effectively disable all
multimedia support, which previously needed toggling four CMake options.
WebKitGTK
2.52.1 and
WPE WebKit 2.52.1 have
been released. On top of a small corrections typical of the first point
releases in a new stable series, this one includes a number of fixes for
security issues, and it is a recommended update. The corresponding security
advisory, WSA-2026-0002
(GTK,
WPE) has been published as
well.
Community & Events 🤝
Simón Pena wrote a blog post showing how to create a minimal WPE launcher, which uses a Fedora Podman container with pre-built WPE WebKit libraries and a launcher with barely 10 lines of code to display a web view. This complements Kate Lee's custom HTML context menu blog post from last week.
That’s all for this week!
