Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from May 11 to May 18.
For this week we have quite a collection of news! Ranging a variety of improvements to dialog.requestClose(), rendering fixes, the new Skia-based compositor enabled by default, and proper versioning and improvements to the WebKit Container SDK, there's news for everyone.
Cross-Port 🐱
Update the closeWatcher.requestClose() function to no longer require user activation, aligning with the spec.
Implement actually moving the node in the DOM when moveBefore() is called.
Fix handling of nested calls to dialog.requestClose().
Add missing preliminary checks to dialog.requestClose().
Graphics 🖼️
Fixed an issue where background images were unexpectedly stretched, primarily affecting the reCAPTCHA checkmark image.
The new compositor using Skia API instead of TextureMapper is now enabled by default.
Infrastructure 🏗️
Added opt-in auto-enter for the WebKit Container SDK - the GTK/WPE wrapper scripts (build-webkit, run-webkit-tests, run-api-tests, etc.) now relaunch themselves inside a pinned wkdev-build podman container when WEBKIT_CONTAINER_SDK_ENABLE_AUTOENTER=1 is set. A new .wkdev-sdk-version file at the repo root pins the SDK image, so the image can be bumped in a PR and validated through EWS. Without the flag, wrappers run on the host exactly as before.
Introduced a proper version scheme for the wkdev-sdk image provided by the WebKit Container SDK so consumers can pin to a known revision. The :latest tag, the WKDEV_SDK_TAG/--tag override and the tag/* branch mechanism are replaced by a single machine-checkable format <major>.<minor>-v<count>-<gitsha> (e.g. 2.53-v1-916f9ef), where <major>.<minor> tracks the WebKitGTK/WPE release cycle, v<count> is the per-cycle SDK build counter, and <gitsha> traces the image back to its source commit. wkdev-create gains a --version switch (full or bare <major>.<minor>). wkdev-update supports updating from latest tag to the new versioning scheme, just run it on your host to update to the latest SDK.
Switched the wkdev-build container from a persistent container to ephemeral podman run --rm --init per invocation. This removes the manual podman rm step necessary whenever container creation arguments changed (which the tooling was not handling by itself), the first-run recursive-chown cost, and the podman start step after host reboots.
That’s all for this week!
