Iocane powder

Advancements in GTK+-flavored Web Engines

March 16, 2008 1:05 am xan General

Already back from the Berlin GTK+ Hackfest (managed to not blog even once from there, a bit lame). All the awesomeness that happened has been covered by our fantastic hackers, so I’ll focus an what happened in the ”Web Room”, where hacking on webkit/gtk+ and epiphany with tko, alp and chpe went on all week long.

We did some great advancements that week: we landed the pango font backend, the soup http backend, more progress on the plugin patch (first time I personally see youtube working on webkit/gtk), plans for glib-based unicode management, better windows support for the GTK+ port, a long nice chat with Company about native flash integration with swfdec… we also had some long discusions about the future of Epiphany, and an announcement will be made soon

By the end of the week I decided to get started with the cookies support for the soup backend. When I had a working parser (based on code from the old gtk-webcore, really nice) I decided to contact Dan Winship to talk about my plans. As it usually happens, he already had most of the work done, which he kindly published on a branch (see the bug). Around this point I got hit by libc ‘happenings‘ in Ubuntu, and I spent most of the remaining hackfest time restoring my laptop.

Anyway, already on lovely Finnish soil and while waiting for a movie in a nice cafeteria near Kamppi I fixed some bugs in the libsoup code for cookies, massaged some APIs and added enough glue in WebKit to get this going:

When we finish and commit this and get authentication going (integrated with GNOME Keyring of course!) I think I’ll switch to it as main browser; brave souls from all over are of course welcome to do the same so we can find and fix as many bugs as possible before 2.24. Exciting times ahead!