Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from May 4 to May 11.
This week we have a bag of exciting updates, such as fixes to crashes, better YouTube playback, a handful of advancements to WebXR, and the development releases of WebKitGTK and WPE WebKit 2.53.2.
Cross-Port 🐱
If the filesystem runs out of space while the NetworkProcess is writing into its network cache, the process will crash with SIGBUS. This would surface to users as the "Internal error fired from WebLoaderStrategy.cpp(559) : internallyFailedLoadTimerFired" error, and would be handled by re-spawning another NetworkProcess that would similarly fail.
This was addressed by using fallocate, if available, to reserve the required size. If fallocate fails to reserve, the NetworkProcess will skip caching, avoiding the crash. If fallocate is not available, the existing behaviour is preserved.
Networking 📶
Networking support, including the libsoup HTTP library.
libsoup now supports the zstd compression encoding.
Multimedia 🎥
GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.
getUserMedia() and getDisplayMedia() support should work better thanks to a couple PipeWire related fixes.
Playback of some YouTube videos (usually at low framerate) has been fixed. Eventually a better solution will involve supporting edit lists in the GStreamer MSE backend.
Graphics 🖼️
A crash when accessing the diagnostics webkit://gpu page was fixed, making sure we handle the case where libGL.so.1 or libOpenGL.so.0 are missing.
Fixed missing glyph before ZWJ/ZWNJ if no font is found for the cluster.
Releases 📦️
The second unstable releases for the current development cycle have been published: WebKitGTK 2.53.2 and WPE WebKit 2.53.2. Development releases are intended is to gather early feedback on upcoming changes, and as such issue reports are welcome in Bugzilla.
That’s all for this week!
