September 25, 2009
General
14 Comments
So, we made it in time for the release. After months of hard work 2.28 is out, and hopefully it will hit a repository near you (in case you are not so much into hunting projects in their natural habitat). Some reviews think Ephy/WebKit is not too bad and appreciate the effort we are putting into bringing WebKit into the platform, so I guess we can be happy of our progress so far.
Speaking of WebKit, we branched for our semi-stable 1.1.15 release. After some talks we decided to not declare our APIs stable yet, since the development is still advancing very fast and we could use a full cycle of testing to see what works and what doesn’t, but nevertheless we will support 1.1.15.x as a stable release in every other aspect: no new features, only bugfixes and patches for security issues, supported until the next stable release is out. It’s the recommended companion for GNOME 2.28, so distro guys you know what to do! And, just to see if anyone was paying attention, we quickly rolled a 1.1.15.1 with a couple of important bugfixes; you can get it at the usual place.
2.30 – The Future
But enough talk about the past, what will the future bring? These are some of the things that we plan to do, or at least get started, for 2.30.
GObject DOM bindings
WebKitGTK+ already provides APIs to do most of the things applications need to do when dealing with Web widgets, with one very big exception: access to the DOM. DOM manipulation has to be done, as of today, through sad APIs like webkit_web_view_execute_script, which make doing anything other than trivial things pretty cumbersome and difficult to debug. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to access the page contents through nice GObject APIs, with bindings for all languages through gobject-introspection? Yes, it would, and it clearly is what we are missing to be able to create a new kind of GNOME applications. Other ports, like Mac or Qt, already provide something like this, so clearly we have to step up to this challenge 
Expect to see, at least, basic GObject DOM bindings for WebKitGTK+ in time for GNOME 2.30.
GNOME shell integration
An idea that has been floating in my head since GCDS is to try to integrate Epiphany more closely in the coming brave new world of GNOME Shell. I think our UI can be kept simple and usable and at the same time updated to use all that crap the chip manufacturers have been putting into your computer for the past 10 years, so we should give that a shot. I’ll be attending the Boston Summit to see what I can do about this being among all the Shell gang, and rumour has it Gustavo is already doing some crazy experiments with Clutter and Epiphany.
Accessibility
When WebKitGTK+ was accepted for 2.28 the Release Team expressed their trust in that we’d continue our work improving the a11y support in the engine. Me and Igalia will keep our commitment to see this happen, and with 2.28 behind us I’m already looking into it again. Also, I’ll finally meet Joanmarie during the Boston Summit, which I’m sure will be serve to make things move faster and better.
HarfBuzz font backend
Behdad speaks, and we listen. In his own words the Pango backends in WebKitGTK+ and Gecko are either hacks or have to reimplement lots of things that they shouldn’t have, and the right thing to do is to go down one step in the stack and use HarfBuzz directly. This is also a good opportunity to get rid of our multiplicity of font backends, so expect some HarfBuzz love in WebKitGTK+ in the coming months.
Improved HTML5 media support
The final assault on the Flash empire is about to start, and we want to be ready. We already have support for it, but the WebKitGTK+ team (with a new Igalian, Philippe), is already busy fixing all the bugs and implementing all the missing features.
turbocharged libsoup
A lot is on the pipeline for the tasty library. As I mentioned in previous entries, during the 2.27 development cycle Dan realized some of the things we were trying to bolt on on the library would be much easier if some of its internals were revamped, so he put in motion a bold plan to address this. With that in place, a couple of our biggest regressions (HTTP cache and Content-Encoding support) should be easier to kill.
The bugs! The regressions!
Yes, yes, that too! Be sure to report all of them.
September 9, 2009
General
5 Comments
Possibly I’m about to make a fool of myself saying this, but since I wasted some time a few days ago I might help someone doing it.
Say you are debugging some feature in your program that is enabled with some command line paramater (“random” example: the –private option in Epiphany for private profiles). One way of passing this to gdb is the –args flag, but another one is to pass them to run/r in the prompt, like:
(gdb) r –private
You do your stuff, and then you decide you need to see what happens without the option. One “obvious” way to do it would be to write, after the previous line:
(gdb) r
Right? Wrong. From the GDB manual:
run with no arguments uses the same arguments used by the previous run, or those set by the set args command.
So you’d be basically running your program with –private again. The right way to do it, as the manual says, is to reset the arguments with ‘set args’.
I wonder how many silly things I have done through the years without noticing because I didn’t know this.
September 9, 2009
Blogroll, General, webkit
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Gustavo has written a nice sumary of all the new APIs in 1.1.14 (yes, all that stuff was only for 1.1.14!), so go and check it out if you are interested.
September 8, 2009
General, webkit
21 Comments
Yesterday we released WebKitGTK+ 1.1.14, Epiphany 2.27.92 and Epiphany-Extensions 2.27.92. I haven’t blogged about releases in a while (sorry!), and as the good people at Ars Technica mention development is moving at a “swift rate” (btw Ryan, you can remove the ugly hack to get the contents of the page from your app and use the new and shiny WebKitDataSource APIs) , so there’s a lot of ground to cover. I won’t go through all the APIs and fixes we have done in the last months though, you can always check the NEWS file for a brief summary, or check our documentation page to see what new APIs landed on each release.
To begin with, one of the most visible things that were done in this release is the resurrection of the AdBlock extension, which was the last lonely point to address in our TODO list for 2.28:
Also in 2.27.92, we added support to import all your passwords from the old gecko profile. This requires an optional compile-time dependency with NSS, but I encourage all distributions to enable it to avoid a pretty serious data loss scenario. Together with the cookie import (which landed a long time ago) this should safely bring all your data to the new WebKit world, but I encourage everyone to test this as much as possible before release, since losing data is one the worst kind of bugs there can be.
Another little thing that landed a while ago is a small epiphany extension called ‘Soup Fly’. With it you can see the status of the SoupSession Epiphany is using, with all the messages in it and their state:
It’s already pretty useful to figure out some things (like, “does libsoup think it has loaded all resources in this page?” or “is this resource not loading because the server is not answering or because libsoup hasn’t requested it?”), but we have plans to improve it more in the future, extending its introspection superpowers. (Note to GNOME artists: an icon with a cute fly would be awesome for this! nudge nudge, wink wink).
Speaking of libsoup: one of the things that I think have worked out better in this whole story is the relationship between WebKitGTK+ and libsoup. Since we dropped the CURL HTTP backend and went libsoup-only, things have improved a lot, and very fast: missing features landed, like SoupCookieJar, SoupContentSniffer or SoupProxyResolverGNOME (and others in the backburner for 2.30, like SoupCache, content encoding support and the “big IO rewrite“), a lot of bugs were fixed and in general our networking code improved by leaps and bounds. Most of the credit goes to the libsoup maintainer, Dan Winship, so buy him a truckload of his favorite beverage the next time you see him around. And of course, all this benefits everyone else in the platform using libsoup, which makes it even better; more succintly:
Another area that saw a lot of improvements was accessibility. With the help of great minds like Joanmarie Diggs each release saw a constant stream of improvements, which hopefully moved our a11y status from “OMGWTF” to simply “hum…”. Our tracker bug for this topic is this, and this is an area I’ll definitely visit again during the 2.30 cycle, since one of my goals in life is to be able to fix bugs faster than Joanmarie is able to open them. Yeah, I know, impossible.
One interesting thing (interesting in the Chinese sense, that is) about working with WebKitGTK+ is that it has so damn big in some senses that you keep hitting obscure corner cases in several tools. Not so long ago, for example, make dist stopped working completely for me, spouting some nonsense about an argument exceeding some maximum length limit. After some investigation and the help of the autotools folks it turned out that between our non-recursive setup and our file count we had hit a limit in GNU make itself. Or that other time when I wasted a couple of days chasing phantom crashes in WebKitGTK+, only to find out it was a bug in GNU ld to begin with. This was already fixed in CVS HEAD though, so that was doubly frustrating.
In short, 2.27.92 is out, we have fixed many dozens of bugs since I last blogged, and the browser is definitely getting there step by step. Go and test it, and reports all those pesky bugs in our tracker. In my next post I’ll talk a bit about our plans for 2.30, which include buzzwords like “GNOME Shell”, “HarfBuzz”, “DOM bindings” and “have you fixed all those regressions yet?”.
