Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from October 19 to October 26.
An exciting bag of news this week which includes a fix for processes not being closed under memory pressure, process prewarming when sandboxing is enabled, a couple of GStreamer-related changes including one that make auxiliary processes' startups faster, and the usual influx of LBSE fixes. In addition to that we got a libsoup release with security fixes, and the deprecation of the legacy libwpe-based API.
Cross-Port 🐱
Fixed prewarmed and suspended processes not being closed under memory pressure.
Fixed process prewarming when the sandbox is enabled.
Networking 📶
Networking support, including the libsoup HTTP library.
Released libsoup 3.8.1. The release contains various security fixes as well as bug fixes for HTTP/2 and zstd encoding support.
Multimedia 🎥
GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.
The Media player now internally uses the GStreamer playbin3 element, playbin support is deprecated given that it isn't much maintained anymore and less efficient than playbin3.
Dynamically load flite when used, reducing process startup time significantly.
Graphics 🖼️
Fixed SVG text not being re-measured when a CSS transform changes the scale of an enclosing <g>, <use> or nested <svg> in the Layer-Based SVG Engine (LBSE). Such text used to keep its old on-screen font size, and it is now laid out again at the new scale, as it already was when the SVG transform attribute changed.
WPE WebKit 📟
The legacy libwpe-based API has been deprecated. While removal is not planned, this means that starting with the 2.56 release series (due in March 2027) building applications that are use it will produce deprecation warnings. The recently announced WPEPlatform API should be preferred, and migrating to it is encouraged.
WPE Platform API 🧩
New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.
The formats array passed to the WPEClipboard.changed virtual function now indicates the array length correctly. While at it, the virtual functions of the WPEClipboard class have been documented.
Community & Events 🤝
Fix dark-mode when using wpe-platform-gtk.
Infrastructure 🏗️
Build with -z pack-relative-relocs reducing the binary size and memory usage.
That’s all for this week!
