Last week in WebKit:
a new hope
A lot of great changes happened this week. There was the first stable release of WebKitGTK+ 2, which is the GTK+ port of WebKit2. A lot of cleaning has been going on and WebKit is getting smaller and building faster. The bot infrastructure has also been moved over from old servers to their new home independent from chromium.
New behaviors
Some new features this week:
- Allan started support for CSS4-Image’s image-rendering property. WebKit already has a -webkit-image-rendering but there is now support for the CSS4 values crisp-edges, pixelated, and an experimental -webkit-smooth. This is behind the compile flag CSS4_IMAGES and disabled by default for now.
- Dongwoo added the parsing for CSS 3’s text-justify property. The feature is still behind the CSS3_TEXT build flag and is not yet enabled by default.
- Anton Obzhirov added GTK+ platform support for Page Visibility.
- Victor Costan made a patch to normalize the MIME type of blob objects.
- Sukolsak exposed the type MutationRecord to the JavaScript window object.
- Jaehun added parsing for the new text-indent hanging value. This is currently experimental behind a -webkit- prefix and disabled behind CSS3_TEXT by default.
Engine engineering
All of the infrastructure that was handled by chrome is now moved to WebKit. The sheriffbot is now known as webkitbot and is smarter (and wittier).
The commit queue is moved to http://webkit-queues.appspot.com. The test-results server is here: http://webkit-test-results.appspot.com.
JavaScript strings got faster thanks to a DFG implementation of String comparison, and of String.fromCharCode. Rendering also got faster with smarter tiling heuristics during loading and window resizing.
A lot of proactive work was being done around security, two notable changes are the addition of bound checking on the Vector class, and a beginning of process sandboxing on Linux for WebKit2 with seccomp filters.
The main effort this week was still around cleaning the code left over from chromium. Some people are also taking the opportunity to refactor header inclusion to reduce build time.
The WebKitten of the week is Ryosuke Niwa for a fantastic job on migrating all the infrastructure and on cleaning WebKit.
Some cool things to look forward to:
- Dirk Schulze started the task of reverting StyleBuilder to its former glory.
- GTK+ could switch to CMake, reducing the build system nightmare.
- The Windows port may also switch to CMake if the Windows engineers are successful.