Here at Igalia we are happy to announce the Wayland port of WebKit.

This port avoids using traditional GUI toolkits in favor of directly operating with the Wayland display protocol. Leveraging the WebKit2 multi-process architecture, the UIProcess is implemented as a shared library and loaded by the Wayland compositor, enabling the WebProcess to act as a direct client of the compositor while still being controlled by the UIProcess.

EGL, the Wayland EGL platform, and OpenGL ES are used for hardware-accelerated compositing of the rendered Web content. GLib, Libsoup and Cairo are used under the hood.

The port serves as a good base for building systems and environments that are mostly or completely relying on the Web platform technologies for building the desired interface.

Overall the port is still in its early days, with some basic functionality (e.g. functional keyboard and mouse input support) and many other Web platform features still not supported. But with Wayland EGL support constantly growing in graphics drivers for different GPUs, it can already be tested on devices like the Raspberry Pi or the Jetson TK1 development board.

In terms of supported Wayland compositors, for the moment we only support Weston (the reference Wayland compositor implementation), which is also used for development purposes. It’s also used for running the layout tests by again pushing WebKitTestRunner functionality into a shared library, though all that is still in very early stages.

The code is available on GitHub. There are also short instructions for building the dependencies and the port, and how to run it.

There’s also additional repositories there (for Cairo, Weston), containing changes that haven’t yet been pushed upstream. In the following days we’ll also be providing Buildroot configurations that can be used for cross-compiling the whole software stack for the different supported hardware.

We look forward to continuing evolving this work, enabling further features and improving performance on the software side and adding support for additional devices.