Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from May 19 to June 1.
The main feature of this week are new releases: stable ones with many security fixes, and development ones with the new Skia-based compositor enabled. Additionally, there was work on Web-facing features, optimizations, spell checking support for the WPE port, and more.
Cross-Port 🐱
WebKit now supports mirroring
MathML stretchy operators using the OpenType rtlm feature.
Replaced the CloseWatcherManager's
escapeKeyHandler, which will allow other types of close signals to be supported.
Implemented queuing mutation observer
records in the work-in-progress moveBefore() implementation.
Implemented popover integration with close watcher.
Fixed popover light dismiss to
account for popovertarget on input buttons.
Content filters now create temporary files in the compiled filters
directory, which ensures that a file
rename can always be used to place them at their final location. This avoids
falling back to a regular file copy, which can be slower, when the temporary
directory returned by g_get_tmp_dir() (typically /tmp) is in a different
volume than the filters' storage path configured for
WebKitUserContentFilterStore.
WPE WebKit 📟
Enabled spell checking support in
WPE. The existing implementation for
the WebKitGTK port, which uses the
Enchant library as a backend, was
generalized to provide spell checking support in WPE as well. The feature may
be toggled at build time using the ENABLE_SPELLCHECK CMake option.
Releases 📦️
WebKitGTK
2.52.4 and
WPE WebKit 2.52.4 have
been released; they include a number of fixes for security issues, and it is a
highly recommended update. The corresponding security advisory, WSA-2026-0003
(GTK,
WPE is available as well.
The release also includes a number of small improvements and Web compatibility
fixes.
Additionally, development releases WebKitGTK 2.53.3 and WPE WebKit 2.53.3 are available since last week. These include a change to use a new Skia-based compositor by default, which is intended to replace TextureMapper once ready. Therefore, bug reports related to website rendering are particularly welcome when using this and subsequent development releases.
Infrastructure 🏗️
The deprecated and un-maintained Flatpak-based SDK was removed. Developers working on the WPE and GTK WebKit ports are encouraged to migrate to the new SDK.
That’s all for this week!
